hot spares

A dead node at 4 a.m. costs twenty minutes if a human restarts it and under five if the system does. The four stages of an automatic recovery, the reason a lost node takes a whole pipeline replica with it, why hot spares beat resharding, and the minutes that each stage still costs even when everything works.

Two restarts a day at fifteen minutes each is the 2%. The loss decomposed into detection, rescheduling, reload and rewound work, the lever on each, the in-memory checkpoint that makes the interval a minute, the square-root pareto of interval against write cost, and the residual that only fewer failures can remove.

You cannot remove one rank from a synchronous job; you replace the node and restart from checkpoint, and the whole craft is making that take three minutes instead of thirty. The detection signals, the drain-restart-quarantine sequence, the spare-pool arithmetic, and where elastic training changes the answer.