Eventual consistency isn't about "losing writes". It's about how long it will take for all of your replicas to agree on/observe the last written versions and, i

Eventual consistency isn't about "losing writes". It's about how long it will take for all of your replicas to agree on/observe the last written versions and, in the meantime, you'll read potentially stale data. Certain data structures inherently tolerate staleness or message reordering: look at your Twitter feed, any kind of log, or other "commutative data structures". If you can't handle staleness, you should probably use stronger consistency. However, if you can find out about staleness after the fact (an asynchronous callback, for instance), you can run some sort of compensatory routine (e.g., overdraft charges for your bank). Then you have an optimization problem: (cost of compensation)*(number of times you have to run compensation) vs. the benefit you get from weak consistency (latency, availability, whatever). There's an awesome paper by Pat Helland about the problem you mention regarding building real-world systems on top of inherently unreliable components. It's called "Building on Quicksand": http://arxiv.org/pdf/0909.1788.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/0909.1788.pdf