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Why is microservices so much more popular right now than, say, distributed processing via the actor model? It feels like splitting things up with HTTP boundaries is a lot of work, less flexible and precludes a lot of re-use. Is it just because of advances in tooling lately like Kubernetes and docker?

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That is a great question. Kubernetes and docker and the recent addition of service mesh layer definitely do make things easier for micro-services. However as another commenter mentioned, Microservices are typically an organizational rather than technical feature. We do use pubsub pattern for distributed processing widely. Regarding the http boundaries point that you brought up, we use gRPC instead of HTTP for most services.

Conceptually microservices is about building loosely-coupled components. Client agnostic interfaces are a part of that, but using HTTP is just an implementation detail.

HTTP makes sense from the standpoint that if you want to have a lot of flexibility over how and where your services are run, they can be addressed the same way whether they're running on one box in your living room or distributed across several data centers.

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