This stuff is studied to hell and back, there is a formalism. This stuff is practiced at staggering scale and the heuristics and cheat-while-no-one-looks stuff

This stuff is studied to hell and back, there is a formalism. This stuff is practiced at staggering scale and the heuristics and cheat-while-no-one-looks stuff is gamed to within an inch of its life. There is an acknowledged nexus of the two in the public domain: https://jepsen.io/consistency https://jepsen.io/consistency.