It's an alternative to writing your own complex networking code for any kind of distributed communications. A lot of people these days might use something like

It's an alternative to writing your own complex networking code for any kind of distributed communications. A lot of people these days might use something like flink or spark to build a pipeline whereas I'd prefer to write a number of small servers with various fan out or fan in operations, broadcast style operations, request/reply semantics etc where appropriate Makes way more sense and much simpler to my mind and allows much better control over performance characteristics.