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Slava @ RethinkDB here. Unfortunately automatic failover won't be a part of 2.0, but it will happen very quickly after that. Please hang in there, we expect to ship this feature some time in May. I just saw a demo of the failover feature yesterday from Tim Maxwell (the lead engineer on this), and it's really impressive! Another side benefit of this feature is live reshards -- you'll be able to reshard/rebalance data…
You guys are killing it. Wish I had a product I could write around rethink....currently at the day job our stuff is mostly Mongo....all layered under django-nonrel with lots of mongo crud so a port wouldn't really be an option I don't think.
Also, why not start a new greenfield project to test out Rethink? a something something realtime something geospacial something app should be a fantastic way to kick the tires, since that's one of the things that Rethink does really well out of the box (as of 1.15) compared to other databases (relational or not)