> Offline is very hard. A lot of bugs happened due to trying to make Horizon v1 work with flaky or very slow connections, and losing transactional consistency as a result. The SOTA here has barely advanced since the 90s, instead the industry has just given up on this and now accepts that every so often there'll be massive outages that cause parts of the economy to just shut down for a few hours when the SPOF fails. Should there be more focus on how to handle flaky connectivity in mission-critical apps safely?
If there's a network partition you have two options: accept reduced availability and keep your consistency, or have better availability and have reduce node consistency. Not much else you can do, that's just life.
Obviously, ways to increase consistency with consensus algorithms etc with 2 phase commits, and you reduce consistency with consensus algorithms. Depends on your requirements.
In many real-world situations conflicts are rare and it's OK to temporarily lose consistency (especially if you know that it's happened), as long as you can catch up later and resolve the merge. Version control is a practical example that we interact with every day but there are others.
A lot of the Horizon stuff was very local to the specific post office, hence their initial replication based design.
If there's a network partition you have two options: accept reduced availability and keep your consistency, or have better availability and have reduce node consistency. Not much else you can do, that's just life.
Obviously, ways to increase consistency with consensus algorithms etc with 2 phase commits, and you reduce consistency with consensus algorithms. Depends on your requirements.