[joshstella]

Thanks for the question, curiousDog.

Disclosure: I am a founder and the CEO of Luminal.

In a distributed, and therefore often largely stateless system at the instance level, the system boundary is now outside the individual instance. The performer (a series of instances over time in Fugue) is roughly analogous to a process on an individual computer. Truth and trust are maintained by knowing and controlling the state of the instances themselves with Fugue. Think of the Conductor as analogous to the kernel in a traditional OS, where providing processes CPU time and resources is a regular course of business.

As for unnecessary work, we've found that maintaining systems in place, with all the failure, complexity and configuration drift that's inevitable is much more expensive than using some of the excess capacity of a given performer. Most systems target 70% or so utilization - we use some of that excess to lifecycle.

I hope this answers the question and we're really excited to get feedback on what we're doing so it's relevant to your work.