From the nuts and bolts of a storage system, we went to a conceptual talk about consistency models and trade-offs with availability. The topic was expertly handled by Boaz Avital from Twitter, who took us on a tour of the Manhattan distributed key-value store. With Manhattan, Twitter achieved higher levels of consistency alongside eventual consistency in the same store. The best part about this talk was that Boaz beautifully and easily separated these concepts from the implementation of the storage system itself, thus making the material applicable to other systems that have to maintain a distributed state.