Self-healing is at the core of much of what makes application fabrics work - whether you deploy on commodity in your own place or on a cloud.

It just has to be a non-event when stuff breaks - both for the work in progress, and for the "structural integrity" of the app fabric itself. Ensuring both enables the app fabric to provide the simple abstraction of a reliable, uber-scalable computing surface.

At any rate, I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago when this video first made the rounds... cool stuff.

I particularly like it because it's a great illustration of the value of simple goals & simple organizational rules, both in theory & in practice.

Take a few minutes to watch it, if you have not already ... and ponder how cool it is when application developers can just assume that their underlying infrastructure behaves as resiliently as do these robot blocks.

Enjoy.

The video is courtesy of New Scientist, and the work is being done by Mark Yim and company, of modlab (the Modular Robotics Lab), at the University of Pennsylvania.

Great work guys ... keep it up!