Eventual consistency
Related service Websites, web apps & online shops
DEFINITION
Eventual consistency means that if no new writes hit a distributed system, readers will, given enough time, all see the same value, but enough time is not the same as immediately. The CAP theorem says under a partition you must pick between strict consistency and availability, and many modern data layers (S3, DynamoDB read replicas, Redis replicas, read models behind an event bus) optimise for the latter. Practical implications for a dashboard: the user clicks save, the POST returns 200, but the next GET still shows the old value because the read replica has not replicated yet. What to do: 1) read-your-writes pattern (the client passes a version or ETag for the just-written resource, and optimistically updates local state). 2) Soft-loading state plus skeleton plus retry. 3) A single source of truth (TanStack Query, SWR) that handles stale-while-revalidate. Never build UI that assumes a backend response is instantly visible globally.
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