Who here interested in middleware?
Recently i found out about Netflix Conductor. Still not sure if this is the biggest meme yet from a current year soy company, or if it's the future. Basically Conductor is an orchestrator for microservices.
It's based on their own database replication layer called dynomite. This stuff is just in-memory so it's pretty fast, but you have to rely on your replication system for any reliable persistence.
Besides Netflix, ING bank and Uber have similar frameworks available on github, all open source and Apache licensed. They all implement simar ideas as described in the Amazon States Language document. (https://states-language.net/spec.html)
I guess if people keep on moving towards microservices, this stuff will gain more popularity. I don't see point-to-point and pub-sub viable as an alternative for coupling microservices, it will never give you good control of your processes.