Scott Bellware's preferred replacement for 'microservice'. An autonomous component is a piece of software that broadcasts the status of its work via messages and lets other components choose to react or ignore; it has no synchronous dependencies and can go down without dragging others with it. Scott argues the 'micro' in microservices originally just meant 'no IBM/Microsoft/Oracle Enterprise tooling' — web developers mistakenly recreated CORBA/SOAP/web-services as HTTP microservices. In Eventide-style systems, autonomous components coexist inside one database (with multiple Postgres schemas) and communicate via the message store; scaling out to separate physical databases is a performance decision, not an architectural one.