Sherpa is Yahoo!'s next-generation structured-record distributed storage service that addresses the growing scalability needs of Yahoo!'s growing list of properties. Important features of Sherpa include high scalability, elastic growth, a global footprint and low-latency access from anywhere. One key difference between Sherpa and other distributed database systems is Sherpa's support for different consistency models, allowing the application developer to manage the trade-off between consistency, availability and performance.