Top all-time · #2879
Christian Posta
Personal blog · blog.christianposta.comsystemsai
Christian Posta's personal blog at blog.christianposta.com covers systems and ai. Since 2015, 27 different Hacker News readers have linked it 54 times, most often “Istio as an Example of When Not to Do Microservices”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Christian Posta's posts on microservices, including the series on data in microservices and his MCP introduction, as explanations of distributed architecture. Commenters cite them as support in architecture debates.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Christian Posta’s blog on Istio, Envoy, API gateways, MCP, and the infrastructure that runs production AI agents.
Most-linked posts?
- Istio as an Example of When Not to Do Microservices5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-01-12
- The Hardest Part About Microservices is Data (2016)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-07-14
- The MCP Authorization Spec Is a Mess for Enterprise3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-04-17
- The hardest part of microservices: Calling your services2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-04-25
- API Gateways Are Going Through an Identity Crisis2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-04-05
- Application Safety / Correctness Can't Be Offloaded to Istio or Any Service Mesh2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-08-10
- Traffic Shadowing with Istio: Reducing the Risk of Code Release2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-02-07
- Has the DevOps pendulum swung too far left?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-04-26
What Hacker News says?
The choice of transport is just one, quite telling, aspect of this mess. Could these commands be executed over websockets? Yes, they could. Will they? No, because the specification literally only defines two transports, and all of the clients only support those. As with any hype, the authors drink their own coolaid, invent their own terminology, and ignore literally everything that came before them. Even reading thr…
Comment linking /the-updated-mcp-oauth-spec-is-a-mess/
on “MCP: An in-depth introduction”Submitted The Hardest Part About Microservices is Data (2016) as a story · 87 points
HN discussionYou are making a lot of ageist remarks. There are plenty of Senior engineers making wrong decisions. For example the istio project moved from microservices to monolith - https://blog.christianposta.com/microservices/istio-as-an-ex... and none of those engineers are "junior engineers" by any means.
Comment linking /microservices/istio-as-an-example-of-when-not-to-do-microservices/
on “Microservices Considered Harmful (2019)”Submitted Istio as an Example of When Not to Do Microservices as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> There seemed to be an implicit claim that client-side load balancing is a win, but I couldn’t quite parse the argument. Having 1 hop for load balancing (usually on a server that most likely isn't on the same rack as your application) is worse than 0 hop for load balancing in your localhost. No Single point of failure and much lower chances of domino effect if a configuration goes awry. > When would you choose this…
Comment linking /microservices/api-gateways-are-going-through-an-identity-crisis/
on “Cloud Traffic”Submitted API Gateways Are Going Through an Identity Crisis as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIsn't one of the defining characteristic of Microservices to have a data persistence instance for each service (even at the cost of duplication)? (I am basing myself on just a superficial interest for MS so I might be wrong - here is what I am talking about: http://blog.christianposta.com/microservices/the-hardest-par... ) If this is correct, than no, Microservices are really not "just like SOA". (If I am wrong, ple…
Comment linking /microservices/the-hardest-part-about-microservices-data/
on “Everything old is new again: Microservices”Submitted Service Mesh Challenges as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis should be on top of HN, really great series and something I will use to justify event-driven distributed architectures when I need to. Spot on! By the way, check this part from the series: http://blog.christianposta.com/microservices/why-microservic...
Comment linking /microservices/why-microservices-should-be-event-driven-autonomy-vs-authority/
on “The Hardest Part About Microservices is Data (2016)”Submitted Istio as an Example of When Not to Do Microservices as a story · 3 points
HN discussionContour is not an API Gateway. Disclaimer: I work for Solo.io An API Gateway can do sophisticated edge security challenges (OIDC, Authz based on OPA, web app firewalling/WAF, etc) as well as things like message transformation, swagger/grpc detection, exposing APIs for self-service signup through a portal, etc. Gloo does all these things. I've written in depth about this as well, specifically in terms of things like…
Comment linking /microservices/do-i-need-an-api-gateway-if-i-have-a-service-mesh/
on “Gloo API Gateway Version 1.3 – Dev Portal, WebAssembly, Knative”Submitted The hardest part of microservices: Calling your services as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The “real” success story of Microservices as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted 4 Learnings from Load Testing LLMs as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Gentle Intro to LLMs for Platform Engineers as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Has the DevOps pendulum swung too far left? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted People Problem and Platform Engineering as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Istio as an Example of When Not to Do Microservices as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Istio as an Example of When Not to Do Microservices as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Guidance for Building a Control Plane for Envoy Part 4 – Build for Extensibility as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted API Gateways Are Going Through an Identity Crisis as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Application Safety / Correctness Can't Be Offloaded to Istio or Any Service Mesh as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Advanced Traffic-Shadowing Patterns for Microservices with Istio Service Mesh as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Traffic Shadowing with Istio: Reducing the Risk of Code Release as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Comparing Envoy and Istio Circuit Breaking with Netflix OSS Hystrix as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Low-Risk Monolith to Microservice Evolution Part II as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Hardest Part About Microservices: Your Data as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Excited about a '2.0' tech stack for microservices with Kubernetes, Envoy, gRPC as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Netflix OSS, Spring Cloud, or Kubernetes? How About All of Them as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Typesafe Kubernetes-Manifest DSL for JVM-Based Apps – Software Blog as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
