Applications today are increasingly being designed using a share-nothing, microservices architecture that is resilient to the failure of individual components, even when built atop cloud infrastructure that can suffer infrequent-but-massive outages. Yet we still see many supporting tools for application monitoring, observability, configuration management and release management using a centralized “orchestration” approach that depends on pushing changes to unreliable distributed systems.

In this Sensu Summit 2018 talk, Chef's Julian Dunn & Fletcher Nichol give you a primer about promise theory and the autonomous actor model that underlies the design of products like Sensu and Habitat, why it leads to not only higher overall system reliability but human comprehension for easier operations. They argue that you should consider designing all of your applications and supporting systems in this way. They may even show a demo or two to illustrate how inverting the design radically changes the notion of “application release orchestration”, so that you can retain orchestration-type semantics even with an eventually-consistent system design.