5 ms·
I think the author is implicitly describing the paradigm shift from software and hardware abstractions to service abstractions. We used to make computers by sol
by kennu 11y ago
I think the author is implicitly describing the paradigm shift from software and hardware abstractions to service abstractions. We used to make computers by soldering electronics together, then by assembling cases and components, then buying premade servers, then renting cloud capacity, and now we're starting to rent everything as services.
The cloud is about going from capex to opex and the "capex" now is the initial work needed to define your own architectures and stacks for every project (before you get to work on the actual project, i.e. the differentiating part). Amazon is eliminating most of this by offering building block services that fit together with little hassle.
So the challenge for open source is how to move on to this era of service abstraction. It's no longer enough to just provide an NPM package or a configure script.
I think Docker is in a good position to bring us there, but it's currently stuck at the stateless container level. Something needs to evolve so that launching a scalable and auto-maintainable database cluster along with a connected web application cluster is as easy with Docker as it is by renting a few Amazon service.
- theseatoms 11y agoHow does OpenStack stack up in this regard? A step in the right direction? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack
- justincormack 11y agoTerrible usability, and mainly aiming at the lower levels of the stack, not the level of actually deploying applications. It is far easier to get a container stack running than to bother with Open Stack.
- servercobra 11y agoIf you want to run your own infrastructure from the ground up, maybe. Ironic (bare metal deploys) + Magnum (container deploys with Kubernetes) is exciting in that area, but as someone who wrote and ran an OpenStack cloud, I wouldn't recommend it. For most people, something like ECS/GKE/bare Kubernetes on a cloud provider is a decent step in that direction.
- takee 11y agoPersonally I think it might make sense to run your stateful apps in openstack VMs and the stateless portion in containers.
- alrs 11y agoOpenstack is an equally terrible place to put stateful apps.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago>The cloud is about going from capex to opex and the "capex" now is the initial work needed to define your own architectures and stacks for every project (before you get to work on the actual project, i.e. the differentiating part). Amazon is eliminating most of this by offering building block services that fit together with little hassle. Maybe they are eliminating it for themselves, but if they are eliminating most of that for you, then that contradicts your prior thesis. You aren't defining your own architecture then, you are just conceding to becoming a part of Amazon's architecture. Amazon will lock you into their ecosystem as much as possible. As Amazon's ecosystem fills up with services, there will be little to differentiate your service from any other Amazon hosted/run service. A much better idea would be to have architectures that don't depend on any specific vendor or company, which are deployable everywhere.
- superuser2 11y ago>there will be little to differentiate your service from any other Amazon hosted/run service. Besides, you know, your product. Infrastructure can kill your product if it's awful, but it certainly can't "differentiate" it in a good way.