Dynomite (ver >0.5.3) extends eventual consistency to tunable consistency in the local region. The consistency level specifies how many replicas must respond to a write/read request before returning data to the client application. Read and write consistency can be configured to manage availability versus data accuracy. Consistency can be configured for read or write operations separately (cluster-wide). There are two configurations.

DC_ONE: Reads and writes are propagated synchronously only to the node in the local rack (Availability Zone) and asynchronously replicated to other Racks and regions.

DC_QUORUM: Reads and writes are propagated synchronously to quorum number of nodes in the local data center and asynchronously to the rest. The DC_QUORUM configuration writes to the number of nodes that make up a quorum. A quorum is calculated, and then rounded down to a whole number. If all responses are different the first response that the co-ordinator received is returned.

DC_SAFE_QUORUM: Similarly to DC_QUORUM, but the operation succeeds only if the read/write succeeded on a quorum number of nodes and the data checksum matches. If the quorum has not been achieved then an error response is generated by Dynomite.

Configuration

There are two ways to configure consistency. The first is in the YAML file and it is picked up on Dynomite's start. The entries in the YAML must appear as follows (the values are case insensitive):

read_consistency: dc_quorum
write_consistency: dc_quorum

The second is during run time through the admin port (default 22222) on all nodes:

$ curl http://localhost:22222/set_consistency/read/dc_quorum
$ curl http://localhost:22222/set_consistency/write/dc_quorum

To check the node level consistency:

$ curl http://localhost:22222/get_consistency    
Read Consistency: DC_QUORUM
Write Consistency: DC_QUORUM

DC_SAFE_QUORUM vs DC_QUORUM

The difference between the two really comes in picture when the query succeeded on quorum nodes but the responses were not the same. If you are very sensitive to reads and writes getting propagated well, use DC_SAFE_QUORUM option. DC_QUORUM gives looser guarantees on quorum in case data mismatch. DC_SAFE_QUORUM will give you error on which you can retry or attempt to repair the data yourself. (straight forward for basic key value). But they both are sensitive to errors.