Eric Brewer is a professor in the Computer Science Division at the University of California, Berkeley. His faculty page describes research spanning Internet systems, databases, support for concurrency in programming languages, and technology for developing regions. He is best known in distributed data circles for the CAP theorem.
Brewer is also identified on his own page as the founder and chief scientist of Inktomi Corporation, the search and infrastructure company that was later acquired and folded into Yahoo. The practical experience of running large Internet services at Inktomi informed his thinking about how real distributed systems behave under failure and scale.
In a July 2000 keynote at the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), titled “Towards Robust Distributed Systems,” Brewer presented the conjecture that a distributed shared-data system can provide at most two of three guarantees at once: consistency, availability, and partition tolerance. That conjecture became known as the CAP theorem after it was formalized by others.
Brewer returned to the idea over a decade later in his 2012 article “CAP Twelve Years Later: How the Rules Have Changed,” arguing that the popular “two of three” framing oversimplifies the real engineering trade-offs designers face during and after network partitions.