330 Large Scale and Big Data
partition. Therefore, and since partitions are rare, designers should consider other
tradeoffs that are, arguably, more important. A tradeoff that is more inuential, is
the latency-consistency tradeoff. Insuring strong consistency in distributed systems
requires a synchronized replication process where replicas belong to remote nodes
that communicate through a network connection. Subsequently, reads and updates
may be costly in terms of latency. This tradeoff is CAP-Independent and exists per-
manently. Moreover, Abadi makes a connection between latency and availability.
When latency is higher than a specic timeout the system becomes unavailable.
Similarly, the system is available if the latency is smaller tha ...