You'd want to get some funding to run the tests (or maybe solicit Google or Amazon to see if you could get the instance time donated once a month or something.
If you started small, with maybe a portion of these features, and then scaled up over time, you might actually get to the point where you had tests that emulated a power failure, or master/slave and dual master scenarios and how they handle certain common network errors (split-brain). That would be an amazing resource.
Edit: It occurs to me I probably should have read more of the article, since this is sort of what they are doing already...