One of the “rules” of application delivery (and infrastructure in general) has been that when scaling out such technologies, all components must be equal. That started with basic redundancy (deploying two of everything to avoid a single point of failure in the data path) and has remained true until recently.
\nToday, fabrics can be comprised of heterogeneous components. Beefy, physical hardware can be easily paired with virtualized or cloud-hosted components. This is good news for organizations seeking the means to periodically scale out infrastructure without oversubscribing the rest of the year, leaving resources idle.
\nExcept when it’s not so good, when something goes wrong and there’s suddenly not enough capacity to handle the load because of the disparity in component capacity.<\/p>\n