Salesforce's data-center design: 'Go for web scale, and build it out of s**t!'

nice concept

but not practical for most folks. Web scale obviously doesn't apply to most orgs. Which is one of my biggest beefs that is the crap of some public clouds like amazon. Most folks don't understand it's built to fail. They don't build their apps in that manor. Very few do. I've worked at a bunch of places including two who launched their production from day 1 in amazon cloud, none of them built their apps to such standards. Even after having massive issues in cloud as a result of built to fail they still don't change their models. Look at how many web sites go down when amazon has a hiccup. It's a wide spread issue.

It makes sense at big scale - though most orgs will never get there.

built to fail is just a whole lot of fail for I'd wager 99.9% of organizations. Really the only way I see this changing in a big way is if the built to fail model is further abstracted away by the platforms. So in salesforce case, the interfaces they expose to the end users/developers writing stuff for sales force may be quite reliable because the heavy lifting is done by salesforce itself. For those writing their own apps at a lower level though, not using a PaaS or something I don't see built to fail growing gaining a lot of traction. Organizations would rather write code that brings in more users then write code that is more robust to failure.

One of the folks I know had a pretty priceless quote recently "this code is so bad, that i need to go to the ocean to make my tears look small"