I found two great explanations of cap theorem on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLtO0vY_M78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLtO0vY_M78 https://www.

I found two great explanations of cap theorem on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLtO0vY_M78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLtO0vY_M78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw1iFr4v58M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw1iFr4v58M And now I hope my understanding is correct: The way I see it, the most important thing to understand first is what the word partition means in the context of distributed systems. If the system is partitioned (being in partitioned state), that just means that some nodes can not talk to each other. There is an outage of some sort and when building distributed systems, you always have to expect that, so the P (partition-tolerant) from CAP is always there, you always have to choose it. After that, you just have to decide if you will be more C (consistent) or more A (available). If you pick C, then this means some nodes will have to wait until the system is back in connected state to get the latest state, but if you pick A, then you always get the answer, the last one the node had before it got disconnected.