You're correct, the system does not advertise partition tolerance, and @Aphyr does indeed confirm that the system is not partition tolerant. Broadly, I think s

You're correct, the system does not advertise partition tolerance, and @Aphyr does indeed confirm that the system is not partition tolerant. Broadly, I think sacrificing P is pretty deeply misguided. If you run a distributed system at any scale for any period of time, you're going to experience network partitions, even within a single DC. (I speak from experience: I work on a distributed system which runs a whole bunch of machines in a whole bunch of datacentres worldwide. We see a reasonable number of non-trivial within-DC network partitions every year.) A much more detailed argument of the above: http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/ http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/ You really do need to think about what happens to your system when it gets partitioned. This paper has much of interest to say on the topic: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/abadi-pacelc.pdf http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/abadi-pacelc.pdf