One of the major challenges in distributed systems is establishing consistency among replicated data in a timely fashion. While the consistent ordering of events has been extensively researched, the time span to reach a consistent state is mostly considered an effect of the chosen consistency model, rather than being considered a parameter itself. This paper argues that it is possible to give guarantees on the timely consistency of an operation. Subsequent to an update the cloud and all connected clients will either be consistent with the update within the defined upper bound of time or the update will be returned. This paper suggests the respective algorithms and protocols capable of producing such comprehensive Timed Consistency, as conceptually proposed by Torres- The solution offers business customers an increasing level of predictability and adjustability. The temporal certainty concerning the execution makes the cloud a more attractive tool for time-critical or mission-critical applications fearing the poor availability of Strong Consistency in cloud environments.
 Techniques such as replication and caching of objects that implement distributed services lead to consistency problems that must be addressed. We explore new consistency protocols based on the notion of object value lifetimes. By keeping track of the lifetimes of the values stored in shared objects (i.e., the time interval that goes from the writing of a value until the latest time when this value is known to be valid), it is possible to check the mutual consistency of a set of related objects cached at a site. Initially, this technique is presented assuming the presence of physical clocks. Later, these clocks are replaced by vector clocks and then by plausible clocks. Lifetimes based on such clocks result in weaker consistency but do provide more efficient implementations. Given a distributed system with several shared objects and many processes concurrently updating and reading them, it is convenient that the system achieves convergence on the value of these objects. Such property can be guaranteed depending on the consistency model being employed. Causal Consistency is a weak consistency model that is easy and cheap to implement. However, due to the lack of real-time considerations, this model cannot oer convergence. A solution for overcoming that problem is to include time aspects within the framework of the model. This is the aim of Timed Causal Consistency.