Consistency in distributed systems

In distributed systems, there exists a fundamental trade-off between data consistency, availability, and the ability to tolerate failures. This trade-off has significant implications on the design of the entire distributed computing infrastructure such as storage systems, compilers and runtimes, application development frameworks and programming languages. Unfortunately, it also has significant, and poorly understood, implications for the designers and developers of end applications. As distributed computing become mainstream, we need to enable programmers who are not experts to build and understand distributed applications. A seminar on “Consistency in Distributed Systems” was held from 18th to 22nd, February, 2013 at Dagstuhl. This seminar brought together researchers and practitioners in the areas of distributed systems, programming languages, databases and concurrent programming, to make progress towards the abovmentioned goal. Specifically, the aim was to understand lessons learnt in building scalable and correct distributed systems, the design patterns that have emerged, and explore opportunities for distilling these into programming methodologies, programming tools, and languages to help make distributed computing easier and more accessible.