Great article, Damien. This idea that network partitions are exceedingly rare was the reason why ElasticSearch goes CA vs. the AP many other NoSQL datastores choose.
Not only are network partitions rare, the most disastrous case where the cluster splits in half is even rarer. Usually, you have a small part of the cluster partition away.
I hope people don't take this as a Dynamo vs. Couch discussion, because the relative importance of partition tolerance is a topic that spans all datastores that give up on ACID.
Network partitions are extremeley rare only for small clusters. For very large clusters or multi-datacenter clusters there is much more hardware than a single switch between servers. Then, the likelihood that something cuts off the whole room full of servers from the rest of your cluster is not something safe to neglect.
http://elasticsearch-users.115913.n3.nabble.com/CAP-theorem-...
Not only are network partitions rare, the most disastrous case where the cluster splits in half is even rarer. Usually, you have a small part of the cluster partition away.
I hope people don't take this as a Dynamo vs. Couch discussion, because the relative importance of partition tolerance is a topic that spans all datastores that give up on ACID.