> "Monolithic Architecture" // shows diagram with like 5 boxes on it...

Those five boxes represent a web proxy/server, an async system (likely analgous to an AMPQ server, Celery, etc.), a caching server, and finally the DB server. That looks like a pretty standard monolith at scale to me?

Yes, each of those consisting of a number of (micro?)services of their own. The Async system alone is a monster. The question is can you build a monolith out of dozens of microservices? Answer - anything is possible with the right marketing spin

Interesting enough, Netflix says that what they call microservices others would call monoliths: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/netflix-java/

I've been using the term "Nanoservice" for the kind of finest-lasagna code we see in the field, but sadly it hasn't caught on much yet...

That’s what any reasonable person has been calling it all along

I guess it's now called monolithic when you don't split your core features into 10 microservices each?

If the same code runs different paths in the the different boxes, it's still 100% a monolith.

So if it never branches?

So what? GP was complaining that a monolith cannot possibly have 5 boxes. (It must have exactly one, I guess, in their vision). You can totally have a monolith that runs the same code base in 5 different "roles".

If they did package the same exact codebase in a single monster binary and ran it that way, calling it a “monolith” would be even more hilarious but that’s not what they did