Taleb's book often came back to the example of the relatively free market that is a city's restaurants. Any one restaurant is fragile, but the entirety of the restaurant business in a city is antifragile - failure of the worst makes the marketplace better.
this is what Salesforce does - they have publicly visible shards in the url (na11, na14, eu23, etc) and login.salesforce.com redirects you to your shard when it figures out who you are.
For anyone considering this, reconsider. It bit me many times.
In general, over time, load on some shards will increase while others decrease. Migrating a customer from one shard to another will likley cause a short outage for them, and many bugs down the line when they've bookmarked all kinds of things.
You need to preserve the name<->customer association and maintain another key that you can use to split traffic at the LB in case a customer outgrows their shard. But personally I think it looks hokey and should not be something a customer sees anywhere but perhaps a developer tool or sniffer.
Except it's really hard to provide treatment for those illnesses if you can't find them regularly, so giving them a home, first, and then bringing services to that home is the only policy that makes sense. Seems to be working in Utah.
So, people should just stop trying to improve things?
XKCD 927 should be considered harmful, as while it is true that's how things sometimes happen, to start quoting it everywhere is to try to shut down people from innovating, and that's anything but helpful.
