[bitwiseand]

I liked the article but I feel the CAP theorem is again misquoted; it often leads to misunderstanding. From the article - "but they would still confront the reality of the CAP theorem: your system can be consistent, available, or partition-tolerant, and you can only pick two"

The CAP theorem states that in the event of a network-partition you have to choose one of C or A. More intuitively, any delay between nodes can be modeled as a temporary network partition and in that event you have but two choices either wait to return the latest data at a peer node (C) or return the last available data at a peer node (A).

Edit: Switched C and A

[bigfish24]

Agree that the CAP theorem isn't as strict as that statement implies. The trade-off only occurs at certain points. Sorry it was a little unclear!

[bitwiseand]

No need to be sorry. I liked the rest of the article. Thanks for that.

[bitwiseand]

Edit: I also wrote my comment because the article is beginner friendly. A lot of beginners will get the right idea about CAP once they go through comments and then back again to your article.

[bandwitch]

Couldn't agree more. This kind of misunderstanding is also described in Brewer's paper "CAP twelve years later: How the "rules" have changed" (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6133253/).

[_dark_matter_]

This is a fantastic article that every engineer who touches a distributed system should read. The simplistic CAP understanding hurts systems by forcing the choice before it needs to be made; i.e. we can (sometimes) have our cake and eat it too.

[devty]

Good point. I often heard that it makes no sense to NOT deal with network partitions and CAP as an "illusion of choice"[1]

[1] http://bravenewgeek.com/cap-and-the-illusion-of-choice/

[toomim]

What a wonderful explanation! You've cleared up hours of confusion I've experienced in my life, with just 2 sentences!

I'm motherf*ing amazzzzzed!!!!!!!

[bitwiseand]

Thanks :)