| Then reboot. You can just unplug it. At this point I wouldn’t worry about file corruption. If the thought bothers you, you can run sudo shutdown now, then unplug.

I wouldn't recommend just unplugging it. I have corrupted more than one RPi sd card this way. Do the latter, it will save you a lot of time in the long run, especially after you spend all the time to download software and set it up -- do you really want to do that again.

This is a fun post. I've been using both technologies recently -- I'm thinking of ways I could practically apply this...hmmm

dd if=rasppi.img of=sdcard

And you are good to go, worth it regardless of how you shut down.

I can't really understand the idea of installing "monster" software onto tiny machines. I wouldn't be totally puzzled if this post came from some hobbyist, but it is released by Basho itself. So what's the idea?

These "tiny machines" are still massively larger/faster/more flexible than the enterprise workhorses of not that many years ago...

The challenge of getting "monster" software onto them is an interesting exercise in part because it reveals a lot about the software when you see how it acts on machines that are constrained and slow by modern standards.

I feel I still learn far more from working on platforms with severe resource constraints than elsewhere, because a lot of issues that still affect larger systems but that are masked suddenly become massive in-your-face challenges.

And of course it can simply be just fun.

You could take advantage of the replication for some kind of highly reliable monitoring device: take different samples with each raspberry pi, the data is duplicated on N devices, and then you can come back later to collect not worrying about sd card or device failure.

The idea is advertising.

Besides advertising it can be PoC of running NoSQL workloads on ARM architecture.

"I thought it might be fun to create a Riak cluster on a set of Pis I had lying around... Note that cluster isn’t fit for any purpose in its current form."

RTFA