Apologies if I misrepresented Kafka's replication. So the system described in the blog post is the new 0.8.2+ stuff with min.insync.replicas taking over required.acks? Will review.
I think there are two separate things: 1. Is there a principled notion of when a write is "committed" and a leadership election algorithm that works with this to ensure committed writes aren't lost as long as the failure criteria are met? This has been true since we added replication to Kafka. 2. The second is what is the recovery behavior when you have no available replicas. Previously we would aggressively elect any replica even if it had incomplete data. Now that behavior is configurable.
There is a more detailed explanation here: http://blog.empathybox.com/post/62279088548/a-few-notes-on-k...
Basically "required.acks" lets you choose between "no acks", "leader only" and "all in sync replicas", while min.insync.replicas lets you control what "all in sync replicas" actually mean.