Is it fair to call an umbrella project a microservice chassis?

Don’t you mean umbrella project - as in the OTP app being the equivalent of a microservice? I’d say by default it is not - however there is nothing stopping you from moving functionality under the umbrella to end up with the equivalent of a microservices chassis.

But I think ultimately one has to be careful with just chasing the microservices buzzword.

https://twitter.com/rvirding/status/711662152633995265

I maintain that in Erlang/Elixir you should be able to get many of the benefits of microservices without having to invest in the usual operational overhead that typically is associated with microservices - however the cost is developer/design discipline. For example the responsibilities and interactions between the OTP applications need to adhere to general service-oriented principles (nevermind the SOA sticker - the principles still apply - it’s the “SOA tooling” that was evil).

Read this yet?
Dawn of the Microlith - Monoservices with Elixir

To a certain degree the appeal of microservices seems to be the illusion that you don’t have to throw your core competencies away - yay, I can still use Java - while not realizing that the organizational and infrastructure changes are so massive that “learning to use a new language”, even something as different as Erlang/Elixir is a relatively minor concession in order to move ahead at a much more reasonable and sustainable pace.

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