One of the most interesting characteristics of the BEAM, in my opinion, is that it's similar to both. As a memory-managed bytecode runtime it's similar to the JVM, and as a distributed process orchestrator+discovery and RPC system, it's similar to Kubernetes.

I often wonder what would have happened if the "BEAM renaissance" (driven largely by the birth of Elixir and associated tools) had happened a decade earlier, before Kubernetes became the de-facto standard for ad-hoc distributed computing in web software.