[coffeesn0b]

Caleb here (SRE at Chick-Fil-A)... we actually just did it because we thought it would look cool :-P .

Hah... no, but seriously... we wrote this article for QCon attendees, and gave a lot more context during our talk at that conference. We didn't realize it was going to be on here, otherwise we would have explained the "why" and not just dived in.

What we were trying to solve for was; 1) Low latency 2) High Availability 3) Container based, zero-downtime deployments 4) Continued operations even in an internet-down event

Also, as an interesting side note, the equivalent hardware has about a 6 month ROI if we put the entire load on AWS... granted it would be more efficient, so that's not an entirely fair comparison, but the hardware is unbelievably inexpensive from a cost perspective.