In distributed systems, the BASE methodology is a set of rules for implementing CAP-based systems:
- Basic Availability: provide continuous availability, despite failures or temporary inconsistency.
- Soft state: use state that can be regenerated (like cached data) for efficiency.
- Eventual consistency: assuming no further updates, all users will eventually see the same value of the item.
The latter two rules help recovery from failures, network partitions, data inconsistency, etc. We can think about it as CAP in practice, where we clean up later. It encourages developers to think about when they do or don’t need consistency.