&gt;I don&#x27;t find it surprising that so many distributed databases fail at ensuring consistency; it&#x27;s a very hard problem<p>It&#x27;s not hard — it&#x27;s slow. Sending reads and writes through Paxos or Raft gives you sequential consistency. But not surprisingly, touching a quorum of nodes for every operation is too slow to be practical for many workloads.<p>And that&#x27;s usually <i>fine</i> — most data aren&#x27;t bank account balances.