Using a full-featured RPC framework for IPC seems like overkill when the processes run on the same machine. However, if your project anyway exposes RPCs for public APIs or would benefit from a schema-based serialisation layer it makes sense to use only one tool that combines these—also for IPC. Microservices for beginners For the FlashCam software running on the DAQ servers we converged on the following high-level architecture: Each bright box corresponds to a software process running on the DAQ server.