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I worked on ringpop and the associated tech at Uber, though I wasn’t part of the original design & implementation. This isn’t the origin story I remember. My recollection is that ringpop was inspired by the SWIM paper, Hashicorp’s Serf, and Microsoft Orleans, and was part of an overall desire to move away from Chubby-like CP systems to AP designs.

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Isn’t the sweet spot a combination of AP and CP for different parts of the same problem?

Arguably that’s what Slicer implements. It’s AP for high traffic routing requests that use it, and CP for slower decision making.

Same could be said for things like FoundationDB (and I’d guess Spanner) – topology in CP, “customer activity” in AP, resulting in a system that degrades very gracefully. A bit of a simplification, but I think it’s a good model for services like this.

From the people that I've spoken to, you are correct that this is where the implementation eventually arrived, but I'm not sure that was the original intent. I know at one point they tried a Go rewrite, but I'm not sure that ever shipped or if any design changes were made.

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