[rubiquity]

This was a great post and covers many day to day topics that practitioners tend to hand wave over, especially as distributed systems are becoming more pervasive. Dare I say even some of the statements are becoming cliches.

The section on distributed transactions could have a little more nuance. Particularly the example about the counter where I suspect any system offering transactions also has a CAS operation. Additionally the benefit of a transaction system is that you can offer bounded counters where as an AP or “strong” EC (CRDTs) system cannot.

[jolynch]

Thanks I'm glad you liked it! Your point on distributed transactions is very true, using CAS is what I meant by "transactionally advance a summary".

  For example, you could place a unique identifier on every count event and then roll 
  up those deltas in the background and transactionally advance a summary, either 
  preventing ingestion after some time delay or handling recounting.

Certainly transactions can help, but you still have to data model correctly for failure.

[rubiquity]

Thank you for pointing that out. I misinterpreted that bit to mean something less accurate than CAS.