You're free to view the older revisions of this gist, but much of this content has been rewritten and will appear on the [Basho blog] (http://basho.com/blog) in the very near future.
Update: First part of the series is now at http://basho.com/understanding-riaks-configurable-behaviors-part-1/
Really nice work. I love this article. I only have a few comments.
Start with a description of what the document is. What is the user reading, why should they want to, what are they going to learn?
"but allows the operator and even the developer to tune read and write requests to better meet the business needs for any given set of data."
"even the developer" sounds kind of surprising, tune how?, and "better meet the business needs" isn't very descriptive. How about:
"but allows tuning read and write requests to trade higher availability for increased consistency, depending on the business needs of the data set. These choices can be made by both operators and developers."
"CAP Tuning" isn't really used anymore (I'm sure there are wrong docs somewhere that still use it, and they should be changed too). It came from a misunderstanding of Riak vis-a-vis Dynamo and perpetuated. Strictly speaking, Riak trades availability for latency and durability, no setting can make Riak truly consistent.
Under PR and PW: "may drop significantly". The odds of any given request failing due to unavailability increases.
Under DW: "value be written to the backend" should probably clarify by comparing W does not wait for the backend to reply. Better to be a little too pedantic than not enough in this case.