[muraiki]

Something to think about: this is similar what people are building (outside of Erlang/Elixir) using Docker and CoreOS. Deploy a bunch of instances of your app both to scale and to handle failures. Need to update the OS on a box? Restart it, there's other app instances to cover it. A container crashed? Restart it -- it's not sharing state with other instances so things will be fine.

Another way to handle error propagation transparently is using monads. Even if you haven't used monads in Haskell, you've probably used them in Javascript: promises are monads. Consider how both errors and exceptions propagate through .then chains in promises. There might not be as much syntactic sugar in JS as there is in Haskell, but the idea is pretty much the same.