In one aspect, the present invention features a system including a local computing device in communication with a distributed computing system, the local computing device configured to perform computations for a first portion of a computer software application and to send a second portion of the application for computation on the distributed computing system. According to such an aspect, the distributed computing system may include a node computing device configured to perform computations for the second portion of the application, a persistent data storage queue in communication with the node computing device, the persistent data storage configured to store the second portion of the application, wherein a minimum availability of the distributed computing system is defined by an availability of the persistent data storage, and a compute function deployed on the distributed computing system, the second portion of the application including a job with an input, wherein the input has a task to be performed by the compute function, and wherein the input need not be supplied to the job at a time of job creation.