Eventual Consistency, Eventually a Pain-in-the-Ass

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Posted on 29th July 2008 by jeff in Product Strategy

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I love SimpleDB, no really I friggin’ love it but old habits die hard and sometimes I don’t use it the way I should.  Or maybe I’m just not patient enough <cough>. Probably both.

Currently at ParkVu we’re using SimpleDB to store some info — shocking I know. The problem is that this info is somewhat event based. Ok that’s not the problem. The real problem is that sometimes I can query shortly after writing (putting) to SimpleDB and find results and sometimes I can find nothing but try again and find the information I was expecting. Presto: eventual consistency rearing the ugly side of it’s head and biting me firmly on the ass.

Fortunately there’s such beasts as Memcached to insulate you the developer from query/caching heroics.  Eventual consistency, gotta love it but gotta consider it when working in the cloud.