p2p
Eventual consistency is a concept in distributed computing where all nodes in a distributed system eventually become consistent with each other, but this consistency may not be achieved immediately after an update is made. In other words, in an eventually consistent system, updates to a data store will be propagated to all nodes in the system, but it may take some time for all nodes to reflect the updated state.
This is because in a distributed system, nodes may not always be able to communicate with each other in real-time or may have different views of the data at a given time due to network delays, hardware failures, or other issues. As a result, the system may temporarily have inconsistencies, which will eventually be resolved as updates propagate across the network.
Eventual consistency is often used in large-scale distributed systems, such as cloud-based databases, where the trade-off between consistency and availability is important. By allowing nodes to operate independently and eventually converge on a consistent state, systems can be designed to handle large volumes of data and traffic without sacrificing availability or performance.
holochain/concepts
- The data state converges to being free of internal contradiction - Relativity does not allow for a universally correct sequence of events - So order of events in distributed systems is hard! - The Distributed Hash Table is a Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDT) - Data structure that only implements commutative operations - State machine that derives state from a series of operations - Any agent given the same operations will arrive at the same end state (regardless of order)