I've been working on the orchestrator side with Elixir and Phoenix, so happy to continue the discussion for curious minds. One of the coolest things we can do is things like this in Elixir - from any node we can reach out to a sqlite db across the planet:

OrgTracker.with_repo(org_id, fn ->

  repo.all(from sprite in "sprites", select: ...)

That will find or place an Elixir process on the cluster and rpc the target node with our code. Placements can be sticky so they pin to a machine so we don't have to suck down the db every start, but we also balance out the load and handle failover of durable processes automatically. Combined with litestream, the result is distributed sqlite with failover while treating it essentially like a locally reachable sqlite db. Yes there is the speed of light to contend with, but by sending the execution across the wire rather than individual queries, we only ever pay a single hop to reach the process/sqlite.