IDEA: An Infrastructure for Detection-Based Adaptive Consistency Control in Replicated Services

In Internet-scale distributed systems, replication-based scheme has been widely deployed to increase the availability and efficiency of services. Hence, consistency maintenance among replicas becomes an important research issue because poor consistency results in poor QoS or even monetary loss. Recent research in this area focuses on enforcing a certain consistency level, instead of perfect consistency, to strike a balance between consistency guarantee and system's scalability. In this paper, the authors argue that, besides balancing consistency and scalability, it is equally, if not more, important to achieve adaptability of consistency maintenance.