[graycat]

> Really interested to hear user feedback from today's #istio announcement and where it will have the biggest impact.

Okay: I immediately deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise your announcement and for just one, really simple, dirt simple, but totally unforgivable reason: What the heck is a "microservice"? You never said.

That word, microservice, is not in a standard English dictionary, so you are writing undefined jargon, gibberish, junk and not English. You are insulting me and even worse yourself.

Instead, write English. Get rid of the undefined jargon.

Got it?

This was a difficult lesson?

> the biggest impact

Until you learn to communicate at, say, the late elementary grade school level, e.g., learn to write English, the impact promises to be minimal.

[graphememes]

I'm not sure if you're trolling or genuinely don't understand, so I think I can help you a little bit.

Microservices are services that are generally containerized and are easily distributable through some form of a network to be easily replaceable parts. These services are defined by a specification where they do a single task, expose some endpoint or API and are composable with other microservices.

There is a need for these services to talk to each other, and to external services and to do this they use some form of a meshing network. These networks right now are done through container networks, such as the Docker Overlay Network, the Kubernetes "POD" system, linkerd, serf, and a multitude of other systems like istio. It is a space or area of concern, because there is no singular approach to all these differing container services right now. So all of them are vying to be the one that wins.

The issue that I find here is that you're looking in an English dictionary while these are technical networking / operating system terminologies and that dictionary will not help you in this namespace.

This page might help you a little more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microservices

Also: Service being, a backend or software that performs some action based on an input / output

[graycat]

Nice. Thanks. I'm perfectly serious -- obviously the OP didn't define microservices -- you did. Good for you. Bad for the OP.

Okay, microservices look like what used to be called agents. For their communications there have been various efforts at ways to define data objects, complete with a registration hierarchy (that is, a case of public naming) and an inheritance hierarchy (roughly like some of inheritance in some cases of object oriented software). So, we had object request brokers, CORBA or some such. And we had the ISO/OSI CMIS/CMIP where ISO maybe abbreviates international standards organization, where OSI may abbreviate something in French, where some international telecommunications group, maybe part of the UN, was involved, and where CMIS abbreviated common management information system, and CMIP, common management information protocol, all mostly aimed at computer and network system monitoring and management. The work was somehow close to some old Unix work with management information base and ASN.1 -- abstract syntax notation version 1. Whew!

Okay, if there are to be lots of such microservices, as you nicely described, then they will want to be able to communicate. So, maybe they will want to use JSON (as I understand it, essentially just name-value pairs -- from Google, JavaScript Object Notation and, thus, maybe more than just name-value pairs), other mark up languages,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_document_markup_langua...

etc. But we'd have to suspect that there needs to be some common global standards and data definitions.

Okay. Gee, in the past I went through a lot of that CMIS/CMIP, ASN.1, etc. stuff, wrote some internal papers, wrote some software, etc. so was totally torqued at microservices without definitions. Right, maybe the hidden secret is that we're supposed to retreat to Wikipedia for the undefined terms and acronyms -- bummer.

But, I still wonder: How popular, pervasive, important, practical so far are microservices? E.g., are they a lot like agents for system monitoring and management? Where are microservices getting to be important.

No, I'm not trolling. And with your description of microservices, we're making progress here.

[gegtik]

There's some reading here https://hn.algolia.com/?query=microservice&sort=byPopularity...

[graycat]

Good. Maybe the OP should have given the reference.

My main interest here is not microservices but just to tell the HN and computing community to be much more careful with undefined terminology and acronyms.

Here we now have some good descriptions and references on microservices. Good.

My main point is that articles on computing need to have, gee, call them links, to explain jargon and acronyms, to explain stuff not in an English dictionary. The OP on microservices I am using just as an example.

To me, poor technical writing in computing and computer documentation has been one of the worst obstacles to my startup -- darned near killed my startup -- and is a sore point.

[gegtik]

I guess my point is that microservices have been well trodden in this forum context, I would not expect every article to require a basic primer explaining every concept

[graphememes]

Sounds like you've got a good grasp on learning terms and acronyms already. Glad to see that the Wikipedia article helped ;)