Handling Eventual Consistency with Amazon SimpleDB and Ruby
Eventual consistency. The storage system guarantees that if no new updates are made to the object eventually (after the inconsistency window closes) all accesses will return the last updated value.
My coworker wrote up our experience writing ruby integration tests against Amazon SimpleDB. You should know that we were in an integration test that runs infrequently. Production code should not use this retry method. You should be using exponential back off when you get an error code. I’ve heard that not doing this is the equivalent of crossing-the-streams in Ghost Busters.