NewSQL databases fail to guarantee consistency and I blame Spanner
The context of this article still seems to constrain consistency to guarantees for single atomic units of data (atomic at the node level).<p>But the second you have multiple-node transactions (your data after all in a truly distributed system will exist on mulitple nodes), then the single-node reliability become dependent on multiple data exchanges across networks for confirmations. Then your network partition exposure starts to snowball.<p>Same thing for joins. Great if your joins are perfectly served by a node-local sharding strategy, but when you retrieve from multiple nodes, again your network partitioning risk starts to compound.<p>In AWS you will see noisy neighbor networks and network unreliability. Your VMs get yanked. Your EBS might experience an IO pause. GC pauses. Or simply one of your nodes might get swamped by a query spike.