> Were there tools that helped keep all the services running together in a single machine? Traditionally, services on unix system are started and supervised di

> Were there tools that helped keep all the services running together in a single machine? Traditionally, services on unix system are started and supervised directly by the init process ("init system"). That has been SysV init for most of the time, but in the last decade we got two major new systems: upstart (dead now) and the infamous systemd. Using systemd can still be a very good alternative to using docker today. > Was it a machine stack per service? That still sounds like a good approach to me today. If your service is not big/expensive enough to need at least one full machine, why bother cutting your app up into such small services in the first place? For example, for web applications, a traditional setup would have been to have a couple of dedicated servers that run the database and a larger pool of webservers that serve the (stateless) application. In front of that you could have two linux boxes doing the network load balancing and failover or a commercial load balancer "box" product.