Comment by uncreativebrian

Hi Jay -- this is Brian (I wrote the article). There are constant tradeoffs. I am leery to say we are the most sophisticated bare metal setup. I think all of us that are close to the work would love for many parts to be much more sophisticated. That said, the way we handle distributed data right now is using Mongodb. We have a cluster that spans the three nodes that we have in a restaurant. The primary use case is persistence for our MQTT topics. Most of this data is what I will call "mildly ephemeral". It isn't needed for the long term, but we do `hope` to maintain it long enough to exfiltrate it to the cloud and deliver it to any necessary recipients. If we were to have a global cluster outage, it is not the end of the world. Over time, it probably will be. Back to work! :)