It looks like all reads and writes for a specific partition must go through the master node for that partition. Is that the case? If so, are there any plans to allow clients to read from the replicas if they are willing to get less fresh data? Another option would be to have Membase return a sequence ID as part of the result of a write to the master. Then a subsequent read request could present that sequence ID to a replica and have it block until either a timeout occurred or it was able to serve data at least as fresh as that sequence ID.