This part was confusing and possibly useless. The source oreilly article (https://www.oreilly.com/content/software-architecture-patter...) cites a web browser-based auction site. That doesn't sound very "data decoupled" to me when each browser needs up-to-the-second updates on bids.

There's a MMO which uses the approach described in the article. Almost everything happens and is stored in memory, in various independent processing units. Data is dumped to disk only occasionally, in case there's complete system failure (so it's more like a backup). I guess they can afford it because losing some progress in a casual game is not very critical.

Interesting architecture and I really would like to understand better the virtualized part: how does that scale?

If processing units store all data in memory, it doesn’t scale linearly. Maybe sharing is assumed?

I’d like to see some better examples of this if anyone has any!

Hadoop/HDFS