I think the point of such tools is more than just reducing exposure to machine failure. Reducing exposure to machine failure also means that you can run your ha

I think the point of such tools is more than just reducing exposure to machine failure. Reducing exposure to machine failure also means that you can run your hardware closer to end of life without having to worry about data outages. The article about stack overflow mentions this little tidbit. > That application handles around 6,000 requests per second, and around 2 billion requests per month. To be able to handle loads of 1M requests per second, your going to need more than one server dispensing results. Especially since only so much data can be stored in memory without running into performance issues. That said, these kinds of tools are an unique use case. Not all programs need them.