There's a quote from _Transaction Processing_ by Gray and Reuter about ACID transactions that is quite relevant to eventual consistency: "Without transactions,

There's a quote from _Transaction Processing_ by Gray and Reuter about ACID transactions that is quite relevant to eventual consistency: "Without transactions, distributed systems cannot be made to work for typical real-life applications." This is as true now as it was 25 years ago, for exactly the reasons cited by Google. The book is incidentally still a good read.