Yes, that's the standard thinking on distributed systems. I worked on infrastructure at Google for 7.5 years, so I do have some idea how that works. However, l

Yes, that's the standard thinking on distributed systems. I worked on infrastructure at Google for 7.5 years, so I do have some idea how that works. However, lately I've been building a very stateful distributed system and finding that I can do a lot more with a lot less code and a lot better performance -- while still handling failures just fine. This is a complex topic and I can't do it justice in an HN post. But, basically, while you always have to be prepared to start over in case of failure, "starting over" on every single request is overkill and adds all kinds of complication and latency to the system. If you instead permit yourself to set up some state and only start over when there's a problem, you can do a lot better.