[tlipcon]

We have a few entries in the FAQ about this: http://getkudu.io/faq.html#what-is-kudus-consistency-model-i... as well as some more in-depth docs: http://getkudu.io/docs/transaction_semantics.html

Basically the short answer, though, is that reads are not done by quorum, but the client can specify if they need "up to date" reads. If they do, currently, we force reads to go to the leader, but have a roadmap for how to read from other replicas (see the Spanner paper for a rough idea how that can work).