CAP Theorem and Microservice Consistency

HardSystem Design00:00

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Your question is CAP Theorem and Microservice Consistency. Take a moment with it on the right.

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Explain the CAP theorem and consistency models for microservice communication.

Asked in the Round 2 managerial + design stage.

Address the following in a practical design discussion:

Define consistency, availability, and partition tolerance, and explain why a distributed system cannot guarantee all three simultaneously during a partition.
Distinguish strong, eventual, causal, read-your-writes, and monotonic-read consistency.
Explain how the choice affects synchronous calls, asynchronous messaging, retries, timeouts, and failure handling.
Describe how you would choose a consistency model for different microservice data and validate the design.