Are microservices "cloud-ish medium-lived services"? According to https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slides/cc15_mcguire.pdf p21-23, Kevin McGuire  of New Relics classifies the containers in three categories:


VM-like with a lifetime > 1000h
"Cloud-ish" with a lifetime between 24 and 1000 hours
Lightweight compute engine with a lifetime &lt; 24h (and even &lt;1h for 46% of them)




I have hard-time to clearly define what are the "cloud-ish" containers:


Are those typically "microservices" or is this something different?
Would you put applications that scale on demand as part of those "cloud-ish" services, or would they fall into the "lightweight compute engine" category instead?
Are those typically "microservices" or is this something different?


"Cloud-ish" services could include microservices. I would include services that are replicated and/or load-balanced, such that you can sustain downtime on a single machine, VM, or running binary without service disruption.

Their differentiation of VM-like services looks like services which have a lot of local state (in memory or on disk) where frequent restarting would incur lots of downtime (from either the time it takes to boot/populate a new VM or because the service is singly-homed.)


  Would you put applications that scale on demand as part of those
  "cloud-ish" services, or would they fall into the "lightweight
  compute engine" category instead?


They could be in either category. Scaling on demand is a commonly-used "feature" of Cloud computing. Think of "Lightweight compute engine" tasks as things like batch jobs, manually run jobs, one-offs etc.