Would love to hear some peoples' thoughts on good contenders in each of these areas. What are some good boxes to get these out of in 2018?

Crossbar.io is currently an interesting approach IMO.

It does have a single point of failure that is also a bottleneck (the router) and it's a lot of work to load balance / failover it.

But other than that, it provides a fantastic way to make microservices:

- anything is a client of the crossbar router. Your server code is a client. The db can be a client. The web page JS code is a client. And they all talk to each others.

- A client can expose any function to be called remotely by giving it a name. Another client can call this function by simply providing the name. Clients don't need to know each others. Routed RPC completly decoupled the clients from each others.

- A client can subscribe to a topic at any time and be notified when anothe client publishes a message on that topic. Quick, easy and powerful PUB/SUB with wildcard.

- A client can be written in JS (node and browser), Python, C#, Java, PHP, etc. Clients from other languages can talk to each others transparently. They all just receive JSON/msgpack/whatever and error are propagated and turn into the native language error handling mechanisme transparently.

- The API is pretty simple. If you tried SOAP or CORBA before, this is way, way, way simpler. It feels more like using redis.

- It uses websockets, which mean it works anywhere HTTP works. Including a web page or behind a NAT or with TLS.

- Everything is async. The router handles 6000 msg / s to 1000 clients on a small Raspberry Pi.

- The router can act as a process manager and even a static / wsgi web server.

- you can load balance any clients, hot swap them, ban them, get meta event about the whole system, etc.

- you can asign clients permissions, authentications, etc. Sessions are attached to each connexion, so clients knows what other clients can do.

Release Management. It's not what the cool kids are doing but Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Services is the easiest CI/CD solution I've ever used.

Service Lookup - Hashicorp's Consul.

Authorization/Authentication - I've played with Hashicorp's Vault. It seems overly complicated but the advantage is that it doesn't tie you to a single solution and it can use almost anything as a back end. I haven't had to solve that problem yet.

Would like to echo this request.

Had to implement a micro-service architecture in python about a year ago and was jealous of my Java colleagues who (so I heard) have great ecosystem for enterprise service discovery, messaging etc.

Yes, we do. The ecosystem is great and microservice architecture may be manageable even in small teams, but it's always a process that defines the success. From my own experience, the biggest technical problem of microservices in Java can be the performance of the whole system (in a monolith there's much less logging and state management, no network latencies and mismatching parallelism settings). Discovery, auth, messaging, configuration management etc are solved.