User blog comment:DaNASCAT/Introducing Service-Oriented Architecture, A New Approach to Software Development/@comment-24473195-20160829222708/@comment-27274331-20160829224805

We're keeping a close eye on what MediaWiki is doing with services and have had some interesting chats with the Foundation about it over the last year or two.

That said, Wikia and Wikipedia are very different animals, and it turns out the difference between their priorities and ours means there's a lot less overlap in what we're actually building than either of us hoped for. In hindsight this isn't surprising, after all the reason that upgrading past 1.19 is such a big engineering task is how far we have diverged from the "stock" MediaWiki over the last decade in order to build Wikia on top of it.