Fine-Grained Consistency Upgrades for Online Services

Abstract

Online services such as Facebook or Twitter have public APIs to enable an easy integration of these services with third party applications. However, the developers who design these applications have no information about the consistency provided by these services, which exacerbates the complexity of reasoning about the semantics of the applications they are developing. In this paper, we show that is possible to deploy a transparent middleware between the application and the service, which enables a fine-grained control over the session guarantees that comprise the consistency semantics provided by these APIs, without having to gain access to the implementation of the underlying services. We evaluated our middleware using the Facebook public API and the Redis datastore, and our results show that we are able to provide fine-grained control of the consistency semantics incurring in a small local storage and modest latency overhead.