The conflict resolution service assigns a global ordering to transactions as well as pass/fail. Transactions that fail don't do any writes. Transactions that pass still aren't durable, they could be rolled back by a subsequent failure until they get on disk in a few places.

Each machine doesn't have its own commit log at the level of the distributed database. (The key/value store where we locally store data on each node happens to also use write ahead logging, but this is not an architectural requirement). Ideally transactions just have to be made durable in some N places to be considered committed. In practice, we elect specific machines to a transaction logging role, among other reasons because SSDs do better at providing fast durable commits if they aren't also serving random reads.

Each machine is authoritative for reads for some ranges of the keyspace and for the range of versions it knows about. It proactively fetches writes for newer versions. If it gets a request for a version it hasn't managed to get the writes for yet, the read has to wait while that storage server catches up. In practice this lag is very small, as you can see from our latency measurements.