Abstract
Managing data over cloud infrastructures raises novel challenges with respect to existing and well studied approaches such as ACID and long running transactions. One of the main requirements is to provide availability and partition tolerance in a scenario with replicas and distributed control. This comes at the price of a weaker consistency, usually called eventual consistency. These weak memory models have proved to be suitable in a number of scenarios, such as the analysis of large data with Map-Reduce. However, due to the widespread availability of cloud infrastructures, weak storages are used not only by specialised applications but also by general purpose applications. We provide a formal approach, based on process calculi, to reason about the behaviour of programs that rely on cloud stores. For instance, one can check that the composition of a process with a cloud store ensures ‘strong’ properties through a wise usage of asynchronous message-passing.
This work has been partially sponsored by the project Leverhulme Trust award Tracing Networks, Ocean Observatories Initiative, ANPCyT Project BID-PICT-2008-00319, EU 7FP under grant agreement no. 295261 (MEALS), and EPSRC EP/K011715/1, EP/G015635/1 and EP/G015481/1.
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Notes
- 1.
We rely on the following notion of fairness: “If any of the actions \(a_1 , ..., a_k\) is ever enabled infinitely often, then a step satisfying one of those actions must eventually occur” (for a formal definition see[10]).
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We thank the anonymous reviewers of WS-FM 2013 and Emilio Tuosto for their insightful and helpful comments on the previous version of this paper.
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Bocchi, L., Melgratti, H. (2014). On the Behaviour of General-Purpose Applications on Cloud Storages. In: Tuosto, E., Ouyang, C. (eds) Web Services and Formal Methods. WS-FM 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8379. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08260-8_3
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