But there's no "debate" here to be had. All the high scale companies (Google, FB, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, others) do not rely on their distributed system no

But there's no "debate" here to be had. All the high scale companies (Google, FB, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, others) do not rely on their distributed system nodes being able to wind down in an orderly fashion. Shit, Netflix and Google (and likely others as well) stage fault tolerance exercises, taking random nodes (or entire datacenters) out of rotation and checking if things still work. There's no way to get to five nines if you expect your program to always behave. Here's one from Netflix that will give you an ulcer: https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey Here's what Google does: https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa15/conference-program/presentation/krishnan https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa15/conference-program/... >> we all get dumber for it Not _all_. Only those who feel inclined to reject the obvious.