Riak & CAP Thereom

Riak's guiding design principle is Dr. Eric Brewer's CAP Theorem. The CAP theorem defines distributed systems in terms of three desired properties: Consistency, Availability, and Partition (failure) tolerance. The theorem states you can only rely on having two of the three properties at any time.

Riak chooses to focus on the A and P of CAP. The choice puts Riak in the eventually consistent camp. However, the window for "eventually consistent" is in terms of milliseconds which can be good enough for many applications.