[jeffbee]

Right, the contrast I was trying to draw was between what they depict, where multiple nodes are holding a replica of the tablet and performing synchronous replication between themselves, and what BigTable would do, which is to have the entire table copied elsewhere, with mutation log shipping. What they are doing is more analogous to how Spanner would do replication.

[dikei]

Unless you're doing multi-cluster replication, there is no log shipping in BigTable: the data replication within a cluster is taken care of by the underlying filesystems.

Single-cluster BigTable is strongly consistent.