Yup, this has been observed recently: "Data Centers are microkernels done accidentally" http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=674259428780315955&hl=en&as_s

Yup, this has been observed recently: "Data Centers are microkernels done accidentally" http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=674259428780315955&hl=en&as_sdt=0,39 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=674259428780315955... The microservices / web services thing is basically a microkernel architecture, but done over multiple machines. And actually Linus was prescient enough to state this. His argument against microkernels was that it makes algorithms more complicated -- you end up developing distributed algorithms for everything. He says OS algorithms are easier with shared data structures. He explicitly said that microkernels could make sense when you have real distributed hardware and no shared memory. That seems to be what has happened. Linux has turned into a single node OS running the microkernel-ish components for a distributed OS.