CAP Theorem

Consistency, availability and partition tolerance trade-offs.

All topics · 1 lesson · 7 resources

Learn CAP Theorem on System Design Atlas

01Consistency, availability and the CAP theoremWhat goes wrong when data lives on several machines, and the vocabulary for choosing what to guarantee.System Design Foundations · 12 min read

These share a lesson with CAP Theorem.

Consistency Models

Curated CAP Theorem resources

Blogs

CAP Twelve Years Later: How the Rules Have ChangedThe author of the CAP conjecture revisits it and explains the trade-offs more carefully.InfoQ
Google SRE Book: Managing Critical State (Distributed Consensus)Why systems with critical state use consensus, and how the CAP trade-off plays out in practice.Google
Please stop calling databases CP or APWhy the CAP labels hide more than they reveal, and what to ask instead.martin.kleppmann.com
Martin Kleppmann's BlogEssays on distributed systems, CRDTs, consistency and data-intensive design.martin.kleppmann.com

Case Studies

Amazon Dynamo: Highly Available Key-Value StoreWerner Vogels' write-up of the design that inspired DynamoDB, Cassandra and Riak.Amazon

GitHub

System Design (Karan Pratap Singh)A free, structured system design course in markdown, from IP and DNS to CAP and microservices.karanpratapsingh

YouTube

Martin Kleppmann: Distributed Systems LecturesCambridge lecture series covering time, broadcast, replication, consensus and consistency.University of Cambridge