Yep, I kinda meant it as an illustration - the heartbeats are just the base operation that has to occur between meshed nodes, not that that itself is generally going to be the issue (the inter-node communication is likely to have a bit more going on than just that!).

Containers is where I've had issues, not necessarily anything drastic, but I've found myself dropping half of the the things I really want from an Erlang system (mainly making as much as possible non-stateful rather than stateful, not using supervision trees to their full potential) to buttress against that ephemeral nature of containers (I haven't really looked at diskless nodes in much detail either though)