CAP Theorem – A Brief Discussion
Most of us have heard the popular proverb “you can’t have your cake and eat it too”. The literal meaning of this is that if you eat your cake, then it is gone, so you no longer have it. Metaphorically it teaches us that we cannot have two incompatible things.
CAP theorem (aka Brewer’s theorem from Eric Brewer) makes a similar assertion for distributed computer systems. CAP theorem states that you can have at most two of the following three properties; Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance, because any two are mutually exclusive to the third. A brief outline of the properties follows: …