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by justonepost 3213 days ago
It's a polyglot app server with microservice orchestration. It's definitely needed.

Some things to look for, such as registration/discovery of services, intra-cluster load balancing (where it started, no doubt), identity propagation & authn/z

The biggest issue to my mind though is distributed transactions and logging/debug/development. My biggest stumbling blocks with this sort of thing.. stepping through code over microservices is such a PITA.
1 comments
FooBarWidget 3213 days ago
You seem to be very experienced in this area. Can you explain a bit about why you think an "app server with microservice orchestration" is needed?
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flachsechs 3213 days ago
because you can work with individual microservices across clusters without a ton of overhead (or use a monolithic app server), aiding in deployment, rollback, debugging, development.
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FooBarWidget 3213 days ago
How exactly does having an app server reduce overhead, compared to running each service directly without app server? And how does having an app server compare to putting each microservice in its own Docker container and orchestrating them in Kubernetes, which is what more and more companies seem to be doing?
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flachsechs 3213 days ago
having to deal with e.g. php-fpm, fcgi, tomcat, and unicorn separately in the same stack is a nightmare. even if they run in separate locations/clusters/nodes/machines, it's still several different configuration and deployment paradigms you have to deal with.

some people simply don't like containers or aren't tooled for it.

there's more than one way to do it (TMTOWTDI).

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korzun 3213 days ago
You would be able to merge your services under a single server and have them talk to each other internally sans latency overhead. It also allows you to easily scale up and down and segment things on demand.
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MadcapJake 3213 days ago
At a glance, I think this is an alternative to docker/kubernetes. The general idea seems to be to cut the middleman/topman out and let the bottom man (app server) be the "unit" of configuration. Like a sort of integrated docker/<YourLang>-runtime.
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zzzcpan 3213 days ago
No, this thing is more like inetd, while kubernetes is more like an OS for containers and docker is a package manager.
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dithering 3213 days ago
So in what circumstances would you need the polyglot bit? (I guess I'm assuming a container/VM architecture here).
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