Much of the architecture of yoke was inspired by manatee. In fact, we've spent the last 2 years working with Joyent on smartos and illumos, so we were heavily inspired by the great engineering behind manatee.

Manatee didn't work for our use cases, which should not be interpreted as "manatee is bad". Here are a few of the reasons we forged a different solution:

- While node.js is a great language for many things, we didn't want the overhead of running the node.js/v8 runtime alongside postgres. 50M might seem negligible, but with thousands of postgres clusters for our clients every MB adds up.

- We didn't want the administrative overhead of managing a zookeeper cluster, and instead built the cluster management semantics directly into the yoke project.

- This may be different now, but at the time manatee was very heavily integrated into illumos/smartos. We really love smartos, but recognize that not all clients are able to use this tech.