[witcher]

(Bartek here: I co-started Thanos and maintain it with other companies)

Thanks for this - it's a good feedback. It's funny you mentioned that, because we actively try to reduce the number of running pieces e.g while we design our query sharding (parallelization) and pushdown features.

As Cortex/Mimir shows it's hard - if you want to scale out every tiny functionality of your system you end up with twenty different microservices. But it's an interesting challenge to have - eventually it comes to trade-offs we try to make in Thanos between simplicity, reliability and cost vs ultra max performance (Mimir/Cortex).