For this podcast, with encouragement from The New Stack founder Alex Williams, Bryan Cantrill assumed the role of historian and explained how technologies such as AJAX, JSON, COBRA and SOA contributed to the rise of the monolith.

From this historical vantage, Cantrill discussed legacy providers and also how the idea of “microservices” is significantly older than the word itself. Cantrill also talked about creating optimal development environments for microservices, the CAP Theorem, and about the “Uber-ization” of software-driven enterprises.

Bryan Cantrill is the chief technical officer at Joyent, where he oversees worldwide development of the Triton Elastic Container Service, as well as SmartOS, SmartDataCenter and Node.js platforms. Prior to joining Joyent, Bryan served as a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he spent over a decade working on system software.