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 :).