I think this paper is well-intentioned, but is trying to treat the symptoms rather than the cause. The paper focuses on microservices, and then tries to avoid

I think this paper is well-intentioned, but is trying to treat the symptoms rather than the cause. The paper focuses on microservices, and then tries to avoid claims of "they just don't like microservices" by describing the ways in which microservices are improperly used. Do they go back and compare this to monoliths or other architectures? Nope; it's really just "hey I have another microservices idea", heavily gilded. They mention "monolithic applications divided into logically distinct components", but you could just claim your microservices are divided into logically distinct components. They also seem to completely ignore the problem that a logical separation doesn't mean your components are better off. In a complex system, often completely separate components still need to be integrated together in order for the system to function at all, much less operate efficiently. It's not a design flaw to combine different things. It depends on the application. So just separating things logically isn't some scientific computing advancement, it's just categorization. In reality, their solution (a "single binary business logic application" and "an interface that can combine them") is literally a description of shell scripting with Unix tools. Don't get me wrong, that obviously works great, since it's been popular for 44 years (older than IPv4). But if you want to come up with some kind of modern paradigm for distributed computing, maybe we should flush it out a bit more. What we have here is a Google engineer's attempt to make a paper suggesting we make shell scripting for the web, without much to show for it. (Personally, I think the more people try to control the interface, the worse things get. The best and most long-lived solutions in all of computing have had almost no interface at all; a raw TCP stream, 3 raw file descriptors, a set of random arguments, and a set of random key=value pairs, have enabled all modern computing paradigms to flourish)