[SanderNL]

I tend to call these things “distributed monoliths” assuming the camera, ML and laser driver are integral to the functionality of the system.

There is no hard rule that I know of but my heuristic is something like “can I bring instances up and down randomly without affecting operations (too much)”. If so, I’d call that a microservice(ish) architecture.

The waters have been muddied though. Microservices were IMO once associated with Netflix-like scalability, bringing up and down bunches up “instances” without trouble. But nowadays what used to be good old service-oriented architecture (SOA) tend to be also called microservices.

SOA can also be about scalability, but it tended to focus more on how to partition the system on (business) boundaries. I guess like you did.

It’s all a bit muddy in my experience.