This is Brian -- I wrote the article. For what its worth, we considered trying to run our clusters on an array of cell phones since they would natively support connectivity fallback and pack a real effecient resource punch in a small footprint. One of our engineers came up with that idea. With the challenges compiling on ARM and the relative ease of moving forward with x86, we went that way to start. We tried really hard to balance the "ideal" with the short term "MVP", and I think we landed in a decent spot with the NUCs. They give us enough power to run the things we need in the short term, and we have some capacity for horizontal scale in the future as our needs increase. We tried to think "cloud native" at the edge as much as we could without truly being a cloud.
