There’s some history here people are missing.

Back in the day we used cutesy names for boxes, and we did it for good reason:

Back then, before cloud services, when you were building out an application, you would build one computer, load it up with some services, and then when that one started performing poorly you’d add another computer and move some of the services off.

You would frequently rebalance which services went on which box, in order to maximize performance.

But these boxes weren’t services themselves, they were just the machine some set of services happened to run on.

So we gave them cute names because the hardware was largely meaningless. They had no inherent purpose, so we named them Athena, Zeus, etc so we had something to remember.

These names were largely not used for the services. Maybe you did have your FTP service on Athena, and maybe that was the only service on there. You still served it from ftp.techdazzle.com or whatever.

I feel like people just ported this concept forward into the microservices realm because it’s fun, even though it doesn’t really make as much sense in a cloud environment.