It's amazing to me all of the fancy new ways eventually evolve into the thing they were trying not to be in the first place. We see this time and time again. I've been around long enough to have seen it in several situations to the point that at the start of the trend someone looks like the old dog refusing to learn a new trick, then eventually people realize they could have saved a lot of time/effort/money by taking the old's advice and experience.
I have said it before and I am unsure if I stole it: you can recreate nearly any "service" the web/internet has to offer today with only the RFCs prior to April, 1995, with the caveat that I'm technically fine with HTTP; I haven't given it much thought.
I think it was LogStash or Summit Patchy Project, that let you use IRC as a sync for redirecting logs or making a copy. So I made a PCI compliant logging service, immutable ircd (ro fs) that logged to itself via eggdrop locally. All little cattle VMs would have thier logs sourced and synced via logstash to an IRC channel for the vertical the VM "belonged to". All the irc stuff was on an append-only mount on the ircd server, so if audit just snapshot that mount and hand it over.
NOC was in the channels. I think some teams set up dashboard widgets that triggered on irc events.
All that was a POC done completely to prove that it could be done using only stuff from pre-1996 RFCs. I'm sure the company I built it for went with some vendor product instead and I don't blame them, I wouldn't have maintained that - you ever set up ircd? The volume of traffic just for logs was already fun to deal with.
Pedants: I'm working from 15 year old memories and I changed a few details to protect the innocent. I can't remember the project name other than it was a play on "BI" for business intelligence.
