In response to You Do It Too: Forfeiting Partition Tolerance in Distributed Systems, I’d like to remind folks of a few things around CAP.
Partition intolerance does not mean that partitions cannot happen, it means partitions are not supported.
Specifically, partition-intolerant systems must sacrifice invariants when partitions occur. Which invariants? By Gilbert & Lynch, either the system allows nonlinearizable histories, or some requests to non-failing nodes cannot complete. Related proofs tell us that systems which preserve availability during partitions also cannot provide sequential consistency, serializability, repeatable read, cursor stability, or snapshot isolation.