CAP theorem

In his excellent blog post Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods , Jeff Hodges recommends that you use the CAP theorem to critique systems. A lot of people have taken that advice to heart, describing their systems as “CP” (consistent but not available under network partitions), “AP” (available but not consistent under network partitions), or sometimes “CA” (meaning “I still haven’t read Coda’s post from almost 5 years ago ”). I agree with all of Jeff’s other points, but with regard to the CAP theorem, I must disagree. The CAP theorem is too simplistic and too widely misunderstood to be of much use for characterizing systems. Therefore I ask that we retire all references to the CAP theorem, stop talking about the CAP theorem, and put the poor thing to rest. Instead, we should use more precise terminology to reason about our trade-offs. Partition Tolerance (terribly mis-named) basically means that you’re communicating over an asynchronous network that may delay or drop messages. The internet and all our datacenters have this property , so you don’t really have any choice in this matter. The CAP system model is a single, read-write register – that’s all. For example, the CAP theorem says nothing about transactions that touch multiple objects: they are simply out of scope of the theorem, unless you can somehow reduce them down to a single register. The only fault considered by the CAP theorem is a network partition (i.e. nodes remain up, but the network between some of them is not working). That kind of fault absolutely does happen , but it’s not the only kind of thing that can go wrong: nodes can crash or be rebooted, you can run out of disk space, you can hit a bug in the software, etc. In building distributed systems, you need to consider a much wider range of trade-offs, and focussing too much on the CAP theorem leads to ignoring other important issues. Also, the CAP theorem says nothing about latency, which people tend to care about more than availability. In fact, CAP-available systems are allowed to be arbitrarily slow to respond, and can still be called “available”. Going out on a limb, I’d guess that your users wouldn’t call your system “available” if it takes 2 minutes to load a page. If your use of words matches the precise definitions of the proof, then the CAP theorem applies to you. But if you’re using some other notion of consistency or availability, you can’t expect the CAP theorem to still apply. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can suddenly do impossible things, just by redefining some words! It just means that you can’t turn to the CAP theorem for guidance, and you cannot use the CAP theorem to justify your point of view. If the CAP theorem doesn’t apply, that means you have to think through the trade-offs yourself. You can reason about consistency and availability using your own definitions of those words, and you’re welcome to prove your own theorem. But please don’t call it CAP theorem, because that name is already taken. In case you’re not familiar with linearizability (i.e. “consistency” in the CAP sense), let me explain it briefly. The formal definition is not entirely straightforward, but the key idea, stated informally, is this: This diagram shows Alice and Bob, who are in the same room, both checking their phones to see the outcome of the 2014 football world cup final . Just after the final score is announced, Alice refreshes the page, sees the winner announced, and excitedly tells Bob about it. Bob incredulously hits reload on his own phone, but his request goes to a database replica that is lagging, and so his phone shows that the game is still ongoing. If Alice and Bob had hit reload at the same time, it wouldn’t have been surprising if they had got two different query results, because they don’t know at exactly what time their respective requests were processed by the server. However, Bob knows that he hit the reload button (initiated his query) after he heard Alice exclaim the fin