[axiak]

I don't understand this comment. Bigtable requires that each tablet is only assigned to one tablet server at a time, enforced in Chubby. There's no risk of inconsistent reads. Of course this means that there can be downtime when a tablet server goes down, until a replacement tablet server is ready to serve requests.

[jeffbee]

Right, the contrast I was trying to draw was between what they depict, where multiple nodes are holding a replica of the tablet and performing synchronous replication between themselves, and what BigTable would do, which is to have the entire table copied elsewhere, with mutation log shipping. What they are doing is more analogous to how Spanner would do replication.

[dikei]

Unless you're doing multi-cluster replication, there is no log shipping in BigTable: the data replication within a cluster is taken care of by the underlying filesystems.

Single-cluster BigTable is strongly consistent.

[dikei]

There can be consistency issue if you run multi-cluster BigTable, because multi-cluster replication is asynchronous.