[athenot]

ES comes in handy with very large sets of data. If it fits on one (or a handful) of nodes, you're probably better served by a relational database.

When you try to scale something to large sizes AND want high availability, it's pretty much a given you'll be dealing with eventual consistency.

We use ES to ingest billions of records per day. For us, being able to immediately query a row that was just added is less important than being able to deal with the volume in relatively predictable performances.

[manigandham]

It's not a given. Plenty of distributed databases support strong consistency.

ES is not meant to be an OLTP database. It's a search index with a much better wrapper around Lucene, but the distributed part has always been weak. The last several years of updates have primarily been around fixing the home-grown replication and storage.