A data management platform that dynamically runs across many machines requires—as a foundation—a fast, scalable, fault-tolerant distributed system. It is well-known, however, that distributed systems have unavoidable tradeoffs ³ and notoriously complex implementation challenges ⁴. Introduced at PODC 2000 by Eric Brewer ⁵ and formally proven by Seth Gilbert and Nancy Lynch in 2002 ⁶, the CAP Theorem, in particular, stipulates that it is impossible for a distributed system to be simultaneously: Consistent, Available, and Partition-Tolerant. At any given time, only two of these three desirable properties can be achieved. Hence when building distributed systems, design tradeoffs must be made.

A bit fluffy, but more technical than the average whitepaper. It makes me wonder what their biggest deployments look like.