[gregwebs]

As a thought experiment, what do you think of trying to make this completely de-centralized? Each service has its own synapse, and the services form a nerve for that service. They communicate status directly to the app servers, which form their own nerve.

Boot-strapping would of course be a problem, so you would still need a centralized nervous system for that, but you could survive its failure.

[igor47]

i think that another project that aims to address this was announced same day as smartstack: http://www.serfdom.io/

i haven't read much beyond the splash page, but hashicorp generally does great work.