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What's the practical difference between a "real" microservice and an independent process tree potentially running on a different machine? Erlang/Elixir really doesn't have any trouble being distributed across multiple nodes, you just get a lot more latency on your messages.

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You're correct, there's barely any difference, from a structural point of view.

I was mainly taking issue with the author's comparison of processes with microservices:

> You can consider each process a logical microservice

But as you said, the process trees can be considered (micro)services, but I wouldn't say that each process represents a microservice. It's just not accurate in my opinion.

OP here. You make a valid point. I was speaking in generalities in a short high-level blog post. I liked microservices better the first time when it was called SOA (service oriented architecture) in which there was an emphasis on the logical encapsulation of services. How they were to be deployed was a separate concern.

I was really trying to emphasize the logical separation vs. deployment separation and not the "micro" nature. Thanks for picking up on that.

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