Comment by rdtsc
Yup, good point on the BEAM. The joke we used when microservices were hot was that the BEAM is already ahead with nano-services: a gen_server is a nice lightweight, isolated process. You can define a callback API wrapper for it and deploy millions of them on a cluster.
Yeah, the isolation provides a fault tolerance not seen in wide use until Kubernetes.
Although it would be neat to implement some of the benefits of a service mesh for BEAM — for example, consistently applying network retry/circuit breaker policies, or dynamically scalable genservers.