Aerospike 4.0, Strong Consistency, and Jepsen

The text discusses the validation of Aerospike's strong consistency claims through Jepsen tests, which are designed to test distributed systems for problems that can lead to inconsistency and data loss. Kyle Kingsbury ran existing Jepsen tests as well as custom-crafted "nemeses" on Aerospike 3.99.0.3 and higher versions. The results showed no sign of nonlinearizable histories, lost increments to counters, or lost updates to sets. Aerospike's architecture includes distributed record masters that are robust and well suited for high performance Lamport clock implementation. The system is capable of handling clock skew of 27 seconds, which can be caused by real-time clock hardware or operating system "pauses". NTP (Network Time Protocol) open source software can be used to achieve millisecond level time synchronization. Aerospike's performance with strong consistency was tested and it showed high performance even with strong consistency. The availability benefits of committing each write to a storage device were also measured. Kyle Kingsbury found no data loss or linearizability violations in Aerospike 4.0, demonstrating its ability to handle the most demanding data environments with strong consistency guarantees.