This is precisely the point of an article titled Consistency Tradeoffs in Modern Distributed Database System Design[0]. CAP focuses on failures and not much els

This is precisely the point of an article titled Consistency Tradeoffs in Modern Distributed Database System Design[0]. CAP focuses on failures and not much else. There needs to be a richer vocabulary to describe all the axes of performance in a properly (or partially) functioning distributed system. [0]: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/abadi-pacelc.pdf http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/abadi-pacelc.pdf