[roberthahn]

I've been a big fan of microservices for years. I believe that a good microservice has a lot in common with traditional Unix commands. And I find it funny that no one here has gone off on a tangent to talk about how horrible those are.

Unix's tools and good microservices have the following things in common:

1. They are small 2. They are loosely coupled 3. Shared-nothing state 4. They enforce standards for consuming and emitting data 5. They enforce a single standard for piping data from one process to another.

That said, I strongly believe that this won't work for every class of problem. And while I may be putting words into Tom Watson's mouth here, I believe he would say the same. But hey, guess what? This WOULD work for quite a few problems!

Some of the sentiment in the comments here feel defensive and knee-jerk. And I don't understand why. Tom Watson isn't telling you that you should use microservices. He's only explaining why he's using it at Hubble. I'm pretty sure how it turns out is going to have no impact on anyone else here, except (obviously) his customers.

But I hope it succeeds. I think there's a lot we can learn by applying the lessons Unix taught us to web-scale utilities.

[lumpypua]

1. They are small 2. They are loosely coupled 3. Shared-nothing state 4. They enforce standards for consuming and emitting data 5. They enforce a single standard for piping data from one process to another.

This can all be done via libraries with clear APIs, with none of the deployment headache of a microservice.