Do pipes have a good mechanism for communicating over a network in Linux? Genuinely curious. Seems like the benefit of http is that services can live on the same machine or some other machine or a cluster of machines and it won't require anything but changing an address in a config file.
No. Pipes are a local only bidirectional data stream meant for inter-process communication. Sockets were created to be the network form of a data stream. You can get data sent over socket connections using things like netcat or ssh-based IO redirection if you want to get a little creative.
If the benefit of a microservice is that you can distribute it across multiple machines then you really just have SOA.
ZeroMQ is a great idea, but the implementation falls far short of the project's stated goals.
I've tried to use it several times but I've run up against limitations built into the design that make it infuriating to use. Mostly this is due to how ZeroMQ goes out of its way to hide the networking details and refuses to expose them even if you need to know.
And that's the first thing that I thought.