[philipkglass]

Microservices can be used akin to language-independent libraries. You can implement some ML functionality atop Python's marvelous scikit-learn, deploy it as a little service with an HTTP endpoint, and easily call it from an existing Node or PHP code base. That's easier and more effective than forcing unification to one language ecosystem.

[rb808]

Good point that they're language independent. I hadn't thought of that advantage.

[SmirkingRevenge]

Language independence comes with a trade off though.

You either have to repeat yourself by implementing your data models and validation routines in all the languages your service consumers might use, or instrument some language agnostic way to specify your data models and possibly generate code for them and their validation routines/client libraries, for a myriad of languages.

At that point, your basically reinventing something akin to sql and/or database schemas and constraints without ACID guarantees. You can deploy something like apache thrift or google's protocol buffers, and maybe throw in some swagger.io (which are all great things). But they are yet more layers, that for many levels of scale, increases complexity, rather than reduce it.

Or you can just trust all the services to never have bugs or breaking changes for consumer applications...

[zip1234]

Still dependent on some sort of communication protocol.

[sebringj]

The web is a universal standard, not sure how you can get more generic than that. I mean, you can't.

[jacobush]

Bytes are a universal standard.

[blackflame7000]

Big-Endian or Little-Endian?

[sebringj]

oh you... you know what i mean, you have to have some standard way to talk. Bytes are tooooo generic. you don't want to be that guy at the party that is always saying but.... but you are technically correct :)