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Thanks for the details!

Consistency at the individual file can be guaranteed this way, but I don't think this works across multiple files (as you need a global total order of operations). In any case, this is a pragmatic solution, and I like the tradeoffs. Comparing against NFS rather than Spanner seems the right way to look at it.

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This is actually also interesting, in that I don’t think that the file system paradigm actually requires a global total ordering of operations (and, in fact, many file systems don’t provide this). I know that sounds like snapshots wouldn’t be valid, but I think that applications which really care about data consistency (such as databases) are built specifically to handle this (with things like write-ahead-logs).

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