A fairly good example of the confederated system running website hosting using CPanel. By default every machine hosts its own mail servers, web servers, databases, ......
Surprisingly (or perhaps not) its actually very effective for cheap hosting. Machines can handle quite a lot and rather than having many points of failure and failovers, you have one, and only one, single point of failure for the system (excl network connectivity/power/etc.)
Every couple of years something goes horribly wrong, but it turns out most users can deal with (or rather -- have no choice and are willing to accept) a five-ten hour downtime every couple of years.
Surprisingly (or perhaps not) its actually very effective for cheap hosting. Machines can handle quite a lot and rather than having many points of failure and failovers, you have one, and only one, single point of failure for the system (excl network connectivity/power/etc.)
Every couple of years something goes horribly wrong, but it turns out most users can deal with (or rather -- have no choice and are willing to accept) a five-ten hour downtime every couple of years.