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Comment by old-gregg | Hacker News Reader

> but things changed with the advent of microservices.

Microservices is just a marketing buzzword invented by container orchestration start-ups. Partitioning of large applications across multiple inter-connected processes has been around for decades. Your computer is packed with microservices.

On Linux, type `watch date` and enjoy two microservices running and interacting. On Windows, observe a dozen of svchost.exe processes in the Task Manager.

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I have the impression that the microservice architecture lowers the... 'activation energy', if you will, of building components that operate in a different paradigm. It's intensely pursuing the idea that a subservice is only its interfaces. And behind each of those curtains, it would be practical to construct something really weird.

Of course, it's cheaper and intellectually less stressing to just pop up a container, so that's what everyone does... so far. I mean, you need a TCP/IP stack somewhere.

Perhaps a microservice component embodied entirely on a GPU is an easily accessible example, or on one of those fancy ML-specific processors in the bowels of Google..

i don't know about marketing, but things are much more simple, when everything is running on the same machine. There are fewer points of failure, ipc latencies are significantly lower, you are looking at the same system clock (unless you are looking at rdtsc, which is core specific). It's not quite the same, in practical terms.

We got some of the distributed aspects, when we got multiple processor cores and multiple cpus, but it's still not exactly the same thing.

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