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Part of the answer is that some of these services need to be scaled horizontally to be able to handle a significant number of users (e.g. tile servers, the core

Part of the answer is that some of these services need to be scaled horizontally to be able to handle a significant number of users (e.g. tile servers, the core server), another part of the answer is architectural constraints (e.g. the core server needs to keep quite a bit of per-infrastructure data in RAM). (Of course, it's completely possible to build a single container which runs all of the services in parallel, but then monitoring/scaling/availability/etc are more difficult to handle.)

cbsmith 2y ago
> (Of course, it's completely possible to build a single container which runs all of the services in parallel, but then monitoring/scaling/availability/etc are more difficult to handle.) Having done both, I'm always surprised when people say that it is more difficult to handle running N-copies of the same container than a heterogeneous set of containers. Sure, at really large scale you can glean efficiencies from it (which is why one might do it), but there's a lot of complexity that comes with that.