"Riak is designed to accomodate (sp) server and network failures without ever losing committed writes, so this led to a quick response from Basho’s engineers."
As such losing a write to me when I read documentation is losing either a create, update or a delete. Any side affecting operation essentially. Anything that needs to write to disk to record a change...
I was concerned that might be interpreted as spin, but I hoped the rest of the article would reinforce the point that there is no way to guarantee an update is preserved in a distributed system without an approach more sophisticated than blindly trusting clocks.
Writes to a new object are inherently less problematic; while it's possible to temporarily receive a negative response about the presence of an object, the data will always be there, barring catastrophic multiple server failure.
Updates can be entirely lost, and that's something that developers and operations people need to be aware of.
I am with op in that I consider an update a write.
"create/update" are both writes
"write/update" ... eh?