consistency

Distributed systems break in ways single machines don't: nodes crash silently, messages vanish, and clocks lie. Learn the standard failure taxonomy, why a global clock is physically impossible, and how Lamport and vector clocks let you reason about causality without one.

CAP is the most misquoted theorem in distributed systems. Get the precise statement, learn why PACELC is more useful in practice, and master the consistency spectrum from linearizability down to eventual consistency — with concrete trade-offs for each level.

Why every distributed system has to give up something when the network splits. CAP, the trade-offs in real databases, and the PACELC extension that's usually more useful in practice.