>> New distributed, consistent systems like Google Spanner concretely demonstrate the falsity of a trade-off between strong consistency and high availability.

>> New distributed, consistent systems like Google Spanner concretely demonstrate the falsity of a trade-off between strong consistency and high availability. >I am pretty sure that even Spanner becomes unavailable if a majority of replicas go down (or the client is partitioned from them). It only claims high availability, not perfect availability. Any server can, for instance, be vaporized by a nuclear attack. In that case, it won't be available. The software can't help.