"One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a high-throughput distributed messaging system."

In the horrifying finale, Daniel Dennett turns up to reveal that nothing has changed! He was really just a distributed, persistent messaging service all along. And then Samsa wakes up and it was all a silly dream.

“I have no mouth, and I must data stream.”

I'd really like to read this story, although I'd envision the ending closer to Animal Farm than The Metamorphosis. After all, I don't think a distributed, persistent messaging service is quite as shameful/unclean and useless as a cockroach/vermin thing.

Any kind of complicated system can contain quite nasty bugs and being distributed one doesn't really help in this regard.

and with every one of the hundreds of split-second network partitions that occurred each day, he is forced to choose between consistency and availability; sadly at any given instant, he can never have both. Until one day he learns how; he open sources this project, much to the disappointment of his employer who as punishment chains him to a cliff

Is anyone else proud of the fact that when they hear the name of a famous author/artist/historical figure their first response is to think instead of a buzzwordy tech project?

I wouldn't interpret my comment as pride. We're on a traditionally software-oriented website, and I thought of software

You sir just saved me a lot of reading (not that its a bad article). I'm currently working on leveraging the distributed commit log service so my mind immediately assumed that's what the article was about.

Not at all. The fact that Franz Kafka is my favorite writer makes me think of Franz before Apache every time ;) But I must admit that I was very curious about a Franz Kafka siting on HN ;)