In the world of system design, ensuring that your system is both consistent and available is like ensuring that every guest at your party has the same great experience, no matter when they arrive or which part of the party they're in. But balancing consistency and availability, especially in distributed systems (think of a party spread across multiple locations), can be challenging due to the CAP theorem. Let's break these concepts down into simpler terms.

Consistency: This means that every user sees the same data, no matter where they are in the system