Beating the CAP Theorem Checklist

Your ( ) tweet ( ) blog post ( ) marketing material ( ) online comment advocates a way to beat the CAP theorem. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work: ( ) you are assuming that software/network/hardware failures will not happen ( ) you pushed the actual problem to another layer of the system ( ) your solution is equivalent to an existing one that doesn't beat CAP ( ) you're actually building an AP system ( ) you're actually building a CP system ( ) you are not, in fact, designing a distributed system Specifically, your plan fails to account for: ( ) latency is a thing that exists ( ) high latency is indistinguishable from splits or unavailability ( ) network topology changes over time ( ) there might be more than 1 partition at the same time ( ) split nodes can vanish forever ( ) a split node cannot be differentiated from a crashed one by its peers ( ) clients are also part of the distributed system ( ) stable storage may become corrupt ( ) network failures will actually happen ( ) hardware failures will actually happen ( ) operator errors will actually happen ( ) deleted items will come back after synchronization with other nodes ( ) clocks drift across multiple parts of the system, forward and backwards in time ( ) things can happen at the same time on different machines ( ) side effects cannot be rolled back the way transactions can ( ) failures can occur while in a critical part of your algorithm ( ) designing distributed systems is actually hard ( ) implementing them is harder still And the following technical objections may apply: ( ) your solution requires a central authority that cannot be unavailable ( ) read-only mode is still unavailability for writes ( ) your quorum size cannot be changed over time ( ) your cluster size cannot be changed over time ( ) using 'infinite timeouts' is not an acceptable solution to lost messages ( ) your system accumulates data forever and assumes infinite storage ( ) re-synchronizing data will require more bandwidth than everything else put together ( ) acknowledging reception is not the same as confirming consumption of messages ( ) you don't even wait for messages to be written to disk ( ) you assume short periods of unavailability are insignificant ( ) you are basing yourself on a paper or theory that has not yet been proven Furthermore, this is what I think about you: ( ) nice try, but blatantly false advertising ( ) you are badly reinventing existing concepts and should do some research ( ) in particular, you should read the definition of the word 'theorem' ( ) also you should read the definition of 'distributed system' ( ) you have no idea what you are doing ( ) do you even know what a logical clock is? ( ) you shouldn't be in charge of people's data

Also thanks to tef for some editing.