Regarding applications to modern software engineering, this parable is basically about operations surrounding architectures that promote long-lived processes and rare reboots (VAX) vs. ones that promote quickly-spawned, ephemeral processes and which rely on reboots for cleanup (Unix).<p>The modern comparison I would make is between the design of scale-neutral twelve-factor apps in language-platforms made for quickly spawning ephemeral processes ("scripting" languages like PHP, Ruby, Node, Lua, or even—in practice—Go)† and the design of "living system" VMs—and languages thereupon—that load and unload modules over time without shutting down (JVM app servers, Erlang, etc.)<p>It's okay to effectively "reboot" your Heroku instances to get them into a sane state. Not so with your databases, stateful load balancers, or VoIP servers. They come from two different worlds: one eschews state, while the other owns and manages it.<p>† Notice how all these languages are effectively wrappers around the same paradigm. There's a strong sense in which a "scripting" language is just a language that models the world in the Unixine fashion, such that it can be used to glue other Unixine programs together.