Crash dumps don't matter as much if your distributed architecture has to account for hardware failures. (Or VM failures, or network hiccups, etc.) Kernel deve

Crash dumps don't matter as much if your distributed architecture has to account for hardware failures. (Or VM failures, or network hiccups, etc.) Kernel developers still have to use crash dumps to root-cause an individual crash, but crash dumps are most useful for extremely hard-to-reproduce crashes that are rare (but if you are using the "Pet" model as opposed to the "Cattle" model, even a single failure of a critical DB instances can't be tolerated). For crashes that are easy to trigger, crash dumps are useful, but they are much less critical to figure out what's going on. If your distributed architecture can tolerate rare crashes, then you might not even consider worth the support contract cost to root cause and fix every last kernel crash. Yes, it's ugly. But if you are administrating a very large number of systems, this can be a very useful way of looking at the world.