Thought for sure this'd be a thinkpiece on Excel in the enterprise ... Seriously, though, this whole paper uses an amazing amount of terminology - blast radius

Thought for sure this'd be a thinkpiece on Excel in the enterprise ... Seriously, though, this whole paper uses an amazing amount of terminology - blast radius, colony, color, game day, split brain - and an awesome biological metaphor of the Portuguese man o'war. Great read even if you don't care about fault tolerance, CAP theorem, or distributed balancing at AWS-scale. One sample quote of the value of cheap heuristics over full-blown number-crunching: > Globally optimizing the placement of Physalia volumes is not feasible for two reasons, one is that it’s a non-convex optimization problem across huge numbers of variables, the other is that it needs to be done online because volumes and cells come and go at a high rate in our production environment. Figure 11 shows the results of using one very rough placement heuristic: a sort of bubble sort which swaps nodes between two cells at random if doing so would improve locality. In this simulation, we considered 20 candidates per cell. Even with this simplistic and cheap approach to placement, Physalia is able to offer significantly (up to 4x) reduced probability of losing availability.