Not by itself. By itself it would be counter-indicative. But assuming good intent, I felt the buzzword-compliance indicated an understanding of the deeper issue

Not by itself. By itself it would be counter-indicative. But assuming good intent, I felt the buzzword-compliance indicated an understanding of the deeper issues involved. It's a difficult situation. I don't want to spend all day reading an article defending CoreOS. But if you throw that buzzword out, I'm assuming you've had some good discussions about your OS selection and could provide that depth if needed. Same for the others. They're not right or wrong choices, but I'm assuming they're there not because the team wanted to be trendy, but because there was real architectural need. If we're discussing architecture, by necessity we're going to have to skim over a lot of stuff. I was okay that given the team's desire to prevent a single point of failure that the pieces listed worked towards that goal. It's very easy to put too much stuff into a system. It's also very easy just to do trendy stuff without thinking through the consequences. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt until shown otherwise -- and at the end of my comment I was clear about what some of my concerns were.