With Alibaba, Pivotal and Lightbend on board, Reactive flexes its ROI muscle in the microservices world

The Linux Foundation recently announced the launch of the Reactive Foundation. Its founding members are Alibaba, Lightbend, Pivotal and Netifi. So what exactly is this Reactive Kool-Aid, and why are all these companies guzzling it down so fast?

If you buy the premise that developers live in a cloud-native microservices world, then you also understand that most applications are distributed and elastic. The compute is spread across clusters, as is all the data. It could be a few users, or a spike of thousands. Systems need to be architected to handle these spikes. Yet the dark secret of microservices is complexity — the management of resources, costs, performance and latency remain a challenge.