How a 512Mi OOM Killed Our Cluster's 'Load Everything' Assumption

State-oriented consistency: Why we stopped looking for one right answer

A distributed message broker kept OOM-killing pods under identical memory loads, revealing a design flaw: each node loaded the entire fleet's session state at boot. The fix wasn't tuning but reclassifying state by its consistency needs. The authors introduce 'State-Oriented Consistency': ask what happens if two nodes disagree, then pick the weakest guarantee that works. This reframe turned a memory bug into an architectural insight, showing that consistency is per-state, not per-system.