I wandered lonely as a cloud app
Late of Heroku purchases
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of microservices
Beyond the build, beneath the stats
My code in chunks and bits thereat

Continuous was the app deployed
In all its many-splendored parts
They spread in Dockerfiles alloyed
With CoreOS hosts’ very hearts
Ten thousand saw I when I looked
At Kubernetes’ dashboard hooks

The Mesos cluster’s web display
Showed every resource fully used
Yet the goal at start of day
Was just an app for scraping news
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
That wealth to me this stack had brought

Now oft, when at my screen I stare,
Commenting on Hacker News,
My only company, despair
And the bill from EC2,
Then filled my heart with sorrow is—
The sorrow of the services.

Inspired by Paul Biggar’s fictional dialog on the same topic. See also the Wordsworth original of which I frankly am not too fond, but for which I am grateful on the occasion of my own fooling about.

DISCLAIMER: since I have friends who work with some of the named technologies, I should make it clear that I am not down on any of them. As I have said elsewhere (shameless plug!), distributed systems are bad in just about every way and should be avoided when possible. Fortunately—since I make my living in distributed systems—sometimes they are the only way to do the awesome thing you want to do.