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You should read Sun's J2EE specs. There is little semantic distinction between a stateless session bean and a container hosted micro-service. The specs were never fully grasped (imo) by the Java community and those who got it (per gossip I heard) -- appserver vendors e.g. IBM, JBoss, etc. -- effectively crippled the spec by resisting the completion of the APIs that would commoditize their containers.

Sun was really ahead of the game in various fronts.

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So true. I had to read the entirety of the JSP spec (and a few others) when I was an intern to help the company do some static analysis things. I also read a good chunk of Tomcat. Sun had this grand vision of App servers which you could just push code to and it would run completely isolated. The app servers where supposed to be spec compliant meaning your app could run on any implementation. But, and this is what bit the company I was working for, all of the implementations add lots of non-standard bits and broke standard bits. This meant that if you had written your app to go on WebSphere there was essentially no way it was going to run on TomCat without modification.

If Sun had more tightly controlled the marketplace for these things I think the whole ecosystem would have been more robust.

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