[latchkey]

Back in the early 2000's, I was working for the largest hardcore porn company in the world, serving tons of traffic. We built a cluster of 3 Dell 2950 servers with JBoss4. We were using Hibernate and EJB2 entities, with a MySQL backend. This was all before "cloud" allowed porn on their own systems, so we had to do it ourselves.

Once configured correctly and all the multicast networking was set up, distributed 2PC transactions via jgroups worked flawlessly for years. We actually only needed one server for all the traffic, but used 3 for redundancy and rolling updates.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯, kids these days

[ebiester]

Different problems have different solutions.

You likely mostly had very simple business logic in 90% of your system. If your system is automating systems for a cross-domain sector (think payroll), you're likely to have a large number of developers on a relatively small amount of data and speed is secondary to managing the complexity across teams.

Microservices might not be a great solution, and distributed monoliths will always be an anti-pattern, but there are reasons for more complex setups to enable concurrent development.

[latchkey]

Due to the unwillingness for corporations to work with us, we had to develop our own cross-TLD login framework, payments system, affiliate tracker, micro-currency for live pay per minute content, secure image/video serving across multiple CDN's, and a whole ads serving network. It took years to build it all and was massively complicated.

The point I was making is that the tooling for all of this has existed for ages. People keep reinventing it. Nothing wrong with that, but these sorts of blog posts are entertaining to watch history repeat itself and HN to argue over the best way to do things.