Microservices architecture is not a bad thing, microservices offer inherent horizontal scalability, decomposition into small parts, etc., but microservices architectures are also the fastest way to lose your shirt if you don’t think fully through what you’re attempting to accomplish.

Put it this way: what are the major differences between a complex distributed application and a large-scale orchestration of microservices?

· The base protocol of most microservices, REST, is one of the most limited protocols available, particularly in terms of recoverability from network errors.

· There is no developed, proven framework for orchestrating microservices, whereas the Actor framework in distributed…

The question is, what’s the difference?

That assumes though that there is a fundamental difference, and with that assumption I beg to disagree. The number of failures I’ve seen over the past few years trying to orchestrate microservices on the assumption it’s basically easier than writing a distributed application tends to reinforce that disagreement, particularly when the reasons for the failures are looked into.

The similarities between the two are, or at least should be, obvious. In a distributed application, different node types have different responsibilities. This simplifies each node type relative to a monolithic application; likewise, in an orchestration…

A few years ago I posted concerning the identity of the “Last God” in Heidegger’s later works, identifying the last god as Janus, the two faced god of currency, and therefore as the origin of the global financial system. Janus was substituted with Caesar, of course, then with Christ and various other things since, but another two-faced entity, technology, was what made currency believable, and in the turn (kehre) is what has made people lose faith in currency and the financial system as it is today.

Enter 2020 and COVID-19. The US has already hit a record unemployment rate and…

Microservices architecture is not a bad thing. Microservices offer inherent horizontal scalability, decomposition into small parts, etc. But microservices architectures are also the fastest way to lose your shirt if you don’t think fully through what you’re attempting to accomplish.

Put it this way: what are the major differences between a complex distributed application and a large-scale orchestration of microservices?

· The base protocol of most microservices, REST, is one of the most limited protocols available, particularly in terms of recoverability from network errors.

· There is no developed, proven framework for orchestrating microservices, whereas the Actor framework in distributed…

A couple of years ago I had an odd thing happen. Back in 2015, after spending 9 years in Austin (mainly for family reasons — my wife is American) my wife and I moved back to Toronto permanently. Two years later I got a call from a consulting/recruiting firm in Houston asking if I would be willing to move back to Austin, relocation paid, in order to take a job. …

Someone I don’t know personally, but whose open source work I take advantage of quite a bit, is an evangelist for what he calls “software ecology”. Tudor Girba’s basic premise in the use of the term is that software developers barely think far enough forward to consider program maintenance, much less the eventual need to retire software. Since retiring software usually requires that it be replaced, Mr. Girba has spent decades developing software analysis tools to that end.

So, what does this have to do with OS/2 version 5? OS/2 was considered officially dead in 2004, when IBM announced that…

Java has always been something of a half ‘n half: an object language written in a procedural language with very similar syntax to said procedural language.

As a result, there’s a temptation to transfer structures used in procedural programming to Java without accounting for the object nature of (most) of the language’s implementation. This has gotten somewhat better as fewer Java programmers are coming from a C background, although the backgrounds they are coming from are often not significantly better for learning object code. A couple of years ago I had a phone call from a recruiter who specializes in…

Java has problems at present, as I think most people working in the Java ecosystem would admit, and I think that they can be summed up in one word: Oracle.

After releasing Java EE to IBM (well, to the Eclipse consortium officially, but you know …) Oracle has reworked the licensing of Java SE to try to make more money off Java itself. This wouldn’t have been so problematic a decade ago, when open source competition to Java was minimal, but it will have a greater effect with languages such as GoLang, Rust, Julia, Scala, Python etc. eating (admittedly small…