Mark Nadal: Conflict Resolution (with guns)

Mark Nadal, founder and architect of GUN, a VC-funded open source database, argues in a 2015 Distributed Matters talk that distributed systems are fundamentally a physics problem, and that systems should give up strong consistency to stay highly available under network partitions. He describes split brain and the CAP trade-off as reasons master-slave designs fail when a network splits, and he presents a master-master, peer-to-peer design instead. Nadal compares a network delay of 4 to 20 minutes to the light-travel time between Earth and Mars. He proposes an operating-state boundary, with updates above it deferred and updates below it recorded in an append-only structure, and says GUN uses timestamps within this algorithm to avoid their usual vulnerabilities.