Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Think about it, if you read from a replica that is partitioned from the rest of the system and there is no coordination, how would the replica or the client know that the value replica returns is too old and therefore breaks strong consistency guarantee?


No, you don't get linearizability of all operations, you might not even read your earlier writes - but the whole point is that you sometimes don't need these guarantees for reads. You get a consistent snapshot read, and that's often good enough. You can get an idea of how recent the snapshot is based on timestamps, but "recent" is hard to define in a distributed system.


> but the whole point is that you sometimes don't need these guarantees for reads.

If that was your point, than sure. If you drop consistency, you can drop coordination too. But typically people expect reads to be consistent in consensus based systems, which requires coordination.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: