- Serializability: isolation between transactions—as if transactions run sequentially.
- Serializability: multi-operation, multi-object, arbitrary total order
- Linearizability: multiple replicas behaving as if there was a single replica/single copy of data. Every operation happens atomically.
- Consequence: each op returns up-to-date value
- Applies to distributed systems and shared-memory concurrency (multi-core CPU caches)
- Linearizability: single-operation, single-object, real-time order