Wisdom from 40 years ago: Network partitioning can completely destroy mutual consistency in the worst case, and this fact has led to a certain amount of restri

Wisdom from 40 years ago: Network partitioning can completely destroy mutual consistency in the worst case, and this fact has led to a certain amount of restrictiveness, vagueness, and even nervousness in past discussions, of how it may be handled. In some environments it is desirable or necessary to permit users to continue modifying resources such as files when the network is partitioned. A network operating system would be a good example. In such environments mutual inconsistency becomes a fact of life which must be dealt with. [0] TL;DR - you either store your data in one place, or you store it in multiple places but disallow writes when there's a network split and wait for consensus on all nodes... or you have inconsistency and you have to deal with it. [0] Detection of Mutual Inconsistency in Distributed Systems, 1983. Great paper, fairly readable, and still relevant. https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Classes/739/Fall2018/Papers/parker83detection.pdf https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Classes/739/Fall2018/Papers...