Some folks have asked whether Cassandra or Riak in last-write-wins mode are monotonically consistent, or whether they can guarantee read-your-writes, and so on. This is a fascinating question, and leads to all sorts of interesting properties about clocks and causality.

There are two families of clocks in distributed systems. The first are often termed wall clocks, which correspond roughly to the time obtained by looking at a clock on the wall. Most commonly, a process finds the wall-time clock via gettimeofday(), which is maintained by the operating system using a combination of hardware timers and NTP–a network time synchronization service. On POSIX-compatible systems, this clock returns integers which map to real moments in time via a certain standard, like UTC, POSIX time, or less commonly, TAI or GPS.

Since the Strangeloop talks won’t be available for a few months, I recorded a new version of the talk as a Google Hangout.

Previously on Jepsen, we learned about Kafka’s proposed replication design.

Cassandra is a Dynamo system; like Riak, it divides a hash ring into a several chunks, and keeps N replicas of each chunk on different nodes. It uses tunable quorums, hinted handoff, and active anti-entropy to keep replicas up to date. Unlike the Dynamo paper and some of its peers, Cassandra eschews vector clocks in favor of a pure last-write-wins approach.