Dagstuhl seminar review: 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.