I was thinking you could treat is as a distributed hash ring with key shuffling, healing and the like ala Riak. Or a virtual actor cluster ala .NET's Orleans.

I was thinking you could treat is as a distributed hash ring with key shuffling, healing and the like ala Riak. Or a virtual actor cluster ala .NET's Orleans. You could use container migration to move people off dying nodes, or to redistribute the cluster. Ultimately though, it's probably a pretty lean startup and there is only so much experience and effort you can apply to each area.