I liked the article but I feel the CAP theorem is again misquoted; it often leads to misunderstanding. From the article -
"but they would still confront the reality of the CAP theorem: your system can be consistent, available, or partition-tolerant, and you can only pick two"
The CAP theorem states that in the event of a network-partition you have to choose one of C or A. More intuitively, any delay between nodes can be modeled as a temporary network partition and in that event you have but two choices either wait to return the latest data at a peer node (C) or return the last available data at a peer node (A).
Edit: I also wrote my comment because the article is beginner friendly. A lot of beginners will get the right idea about CAP once they go through comments and then back again to your article.
Couldn't agree more. This kind of misunderstanding is also described in Brewer's paper "CAP twelve years later: How the "rules" have changed" (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6133253/).
This is a fantastic article that every engineer who touches a distributed system should read. The simplistic CAP understanding hurts systems by forcing the choice before it needs to be made; i.e. we can (sometimes) have our cake and eat it too.
The CAP theorem states that in the event of a network-partition you have to choose one of C or A. More intuitively, any delay between nodes can be modeled as a temporary network partition and in that event you have but two choices either wait to return the latest data at a peer node (C) or return the last available data at a peer node (A).
Edit: Switched C and A