The other day I got around to finally learn some COM/DCOM, and realized Windows had microservices built in for 2+ decades, and with better protocols and security...

Recently I ported a suite of 30 year old c/c++ programs, each one was deployable and runable on their own and communicated via sockets, microservices from the early 90's. Likewise FaaS doesn't add much that couldn't be done via apache cgi in the 90's.

Was the communication encrypted?

How long ago did you learn that? Because back in the day I didn't know even one developer who wouldn't curse when working with DCOM/Corba implementations because of convoluted complexity, bugs, and problems with debugging.

Less than a year ago. I've been using it a little here and there for almost two decades - DirectX is accessed and operated through COM API - but I never bothered to actually learn it in depth, until I had to jump straight into debugging obscure errors in an application that used a DCOM-based service.

> Because back in the day I didn't know even one developer who wouldn't curse when working with DCOM/Corba implementations because of convoluted complexity, bugs, and problems with debugging.

Yeah, I got that impression about COM through osmosis over the years. But come to think of it, isn't the exact same thing happening with the current trend of microservices, and super-convoluted stacks of Docker containers and Kubernetes? So perhaps the problem ultimately wasn't with COM per se :).

I'm not sure I understand your comment. Active Directory is Microsoft's proprietary tech that is a modification of the Kerberos standard, reimplemented most notably in Samba, but client solutions (open and proprietary) also exist.

Group permissions predate AD by decades, PAM by a few years. SSO in today's form is a web phenomenon, so a web-oriented solution makes more sense, and there is a lot of work being done in this direction.

>Active Directory is Microsoft's proprietary tech that is a modification of the Kerberos standard

And LDAP, and some DNS, and certs, etc. It's not just Kerberos; you're sounding ignorant here.

>Group permissions predate AD by decades

No one said otherwise, but it goes beyond basic POSIX groups with things like nested groups, delegated group permissions, etc.

>SSO in today's form is a web phenomenon

So is AD's...

Basically, you're proving my point.

Windows isn't used in academia.

So you get new grads that are re-inventing the wheel.