&gt; The only thing I disagree with in the article is debugging vs. restarting. In the old model, where you have a sys admin per box, yes you might want to log in and manually tweak things. In big distributed systems, code should be designed to be restarted (i.e. prefer statelessness). That is your first line of defense, and a very effective one.<p>But if you never understand why it was a bad state in the first place you&#x27;re doomed to repeat it. Pathologies need to be understood before they can be corrected. Dumping core and restarting a process is sometimes appropriate. But some events, even with stateless services, need in-production, live, interactive debugging in order to be understood.