The article mentions updating a warehousing software by updating individual copies and making these interoperate with the older copies, so the system can be progressively updated. It also talks about machines that would run without ever being stopped or rebooted. Yet there is no mention of Erlang or updating an application while it's running, which I find rather surprising.
Erlang is a flash in the pan compared to how old these technologies are. IBM's S/360 goes back to the early 60s, then came the S/390, and finally z/OS; the hardware of the S-series could be hotplugged, the entire machine updated in hardware and software while it's running. Since the 1960s!
Like the articles says, us whippersnappers, 00s, cloud-this and distributed that types know jack about this stuff. Kneel and kiss the ring! ;-)
Very little software development is "green field" development, most of it is maintenance of some form or other. Quite a lot of "maintenance" programming is development of new features, rather than merely fixing bugs. However, very few software projects are designed with these facts in mind.
