Presenting the CAP theorem
In 1998, Eric Brewer proposed a theorem that later became famous as the CAP theorem. It highlights the various trade-offs involved in designing a distributed service system. To understand the CAP theorem, first, let’s define the following three characteristics of distributed service systems: consistency, availability, and partition tolerance. CAP is, in fact, an acronym made up of these three characteristics:
- Consistency (or simply C): The distributed service consists of various nodes. Any of these nodes can be used to read, write, or update records in the data repository. Consistency guarantees that at a certain time, t1, independent of which node we use to read the data, we will get the same result. Every read operation either returns the latest data that is consistent across the distributed repository or gives an error message.
- Availability (or simply A): In the area of distributed systems, availability means that the system as...
