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As cited above, we simply CAN'T opensource Borg. It's enormous, and it is deeply, DEEPLY entangled with millions of LoC of Google code. Nobody could untangle

As cited above, we simply CAN'T opensource Borg. It's enormous, and it is deeply, DEEPLY entangled with millions of LoC of Google code. Nobody could untangle that. And even if we DID untangle it, it's alien technology. It does not make any attempt to meet people where they are. It does not focus on open standards or simple solutions to simple problems. On top of that, it's got 10+ years of semi-organic growth in it. There are a lot of mistakes that have been made that we simply have to live with internally. Also, it's C++, for which there is approximately ZERO opensource community. We made a very strategic decision to rebuild it. It embodies many lessons from Borg and Omega (both things we got right and things we botched). It is implemented in an easier-to-approach language (Go) which has an active OSS community. It specifically focuses on "legacy apps" (everything written up to and including today) and open standards (HTTP, JSON, REST). I've never been shy about my opinion that I do hope to supplant Borg one day, but that day is necessarily years away. Of course no major project has ever used it, the whole thing didn't exist just 2 years ago.

deleted 11y ago
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gjvc 11y ago
>> Also, it's C++, for which there is approximately ZERO opensource community. Rubbish, and saying so undermines the rest of your points.
- zeveb 11y ago
  >> Also, it's C++, for which there is approximately ZERO opensource community. > Rubbish, and saying so undermines the rest of your points. Hardly rubbish. Although there are open-source projects which use C++, I and many others avoid them like the plague. I think he meant 'approximately ZERO' in the Spolsky sense, which is 'sure, there are some, but in the grand scheme of things they're indistinguishable from ε.
- thockingoog 11y ago
  Wonderful rebuttal. Proof? There are some successful projects, but that is not a community. There are some libs, but that is not a community. The Go community is vibrant and growing. Go is an easy language to learn (and I say that as someone who LIKES the power of C++) and it is not a total joke to ask people who report bugs to jump in and try to fix them. C++ is simply NOT approachable by mere mortals, and would have made for a very different community and a much slower pace. And I say that as someone who detests many facets of Go - but it's just better at Getting Things Done than C++.
mike_hearn 11y ago
Whilst I appreciate that you're effectively competing with Borg internally, having been a heavy user of Borg for many years I'm not sure why you think it doesn't focus on simple solutions to simple problems, or that it doesn't meet people where they are. Borg always impressed me as one of the best thought out pieces of Google infrastructure: bringing up simple jobs was in fact quite simple, or so it seemed to me, but it also had sufficient power to do far more complex tasks as well. Much of the organic growth, as you put it, can also be described another way: as an accumulation of useful features and optimisations. The language issue was addressed by another response. To claim there's no open source C++ community which is why it's written in Go is just bizarre. There's absolutely a thriving open source C++ community, but if having the biggest open source community was the driving factor in picking the implementation language then I guess you should have picked Java.
- thockingoog 11y ago
  How would you run Apache + PHP + MySQL on Borg? Hint: you can't. Not without HUGE difficulty, anyway. Nobody does it. Part of Kubernetes "meet people where they are" mindset is that we simply can not ask people to rewrite their apps. Truth is, a LOT of people don't write code. They write content and use pre-built code (think WordPress). Borg simply can not accomodate that very well. It's simple as long as you control things from soup to nuts. Yes, some "organic growth" was useful features. But a lot of it was useless features, or features that are now obsolete but can't be removed because someone somewhere is using them, and probably doesn't have enough time to re-test without the feature (true story).
  - mike_hearn 11y ago
    Put together the packages, request a fixed port, disable the health checks (unless I had a file in the Apache root with the right name), start it up? I don't think Borg imposes all that many requirements on jobs, really, and the few it does can be disabled. Or at least could. But I guess we're probably wandering out of the area covered by the papers now.
  - thockingoog 11y ago
thrownaway2424 11y ago
I don't strongly disagree with any of that. I was only pointing out that it's wrong to attribute a decade of history to something like cadvisor, which is brand new and does not draw on anything more than lessons learned from Google production. I also don't blame people for being confused about Google's container infrastructure. Google has issued blog posts in the past that were misleading (at best) about the relationship between Omega, Borg, and Kubernetes.
- thockingoog 11y ago
  Hmm, what was misleading? That certainly was never the intent. A decade or history lead to the knowledge that a particular style of monitoring was needed. That knowledge lead to cAdvisor. Is it perfect, of course not, but it fills a need and is directly derived from Google's experience. I fail to see how that misattribution, personally.

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gjvc 11y ago

>> Also, it's C++, for which there is approximately ZERO opensource community. Rubbish, and saying so undermines the rest of your points.

zeveb 11y ago
>> Also, it's C++, for which there is approximately ZERO opensource community. > Rubbish, and saying so undermines the rest of your points. Hardly rubbish. Although there are open-source projects which use C++, I and many others avoid them like the plague. I think he meant 'approximately ZERO' in the Spolsky sense, which is 'sure, there are some, but in the grand scheme of things they're indistinguishable from ε.
thockingoog 11y ago
Wonderful rebuttal. Proof? There are some successful projects, but that is not a community. There are some libs, but that is not a community. The Go community is vibrant and growing. Go is an easy language to learn (and I say that as someone who LIKES the power of C++) and it is not a total joke to ask people who report bugs to jump in and try to fix them. C++ is simply NOT approachable by mere mortals, and would have made for a very different community and a much slower pace. And I say that as someone who detests many facets of Go - but it's just better at Getting Things Done than C++.

mike_hearn 11y ago

Whilst I appreciate that you're effectively competing with Borg internally, having been a heavy user of Borg for many years I'm not sure why you think it doesn't focus on simple solutions to simple problems, or that it doesn't meet people where they are. Borg always impressed me as one of the best thought out pieces of Google infrastructure: bringing up simple jobs was in fact quite simple, or so it seemed to me, but it also had sufficient power to do far more complex tasks as well. Much of the organic growth, as you put it, can also be described another way: as an accumulation of useful features and optimisations. The language issue was addressed by another response. To claim there's no open source C++ community which is why it's written in Go is just bizarre. There's absolutely a thriving open source C++ community, but if having the biggest open source community was the driving factor in picking the implementation language then I guess you should have picked Java.

thockingoog 11y ago
How would you run Apache + PHP + MySQL on Borg? Hint: you can't. Not without HUGE difficulty, anyway. Nobody does it. Part of Kubernetes "meet people where they are" mindset is that we simply can not ask people to rewrite their apps. Truth is, a LOT of people don't write code. They write content and use pre-built code (think WordPress). Borg simply can not accomodate that very well. It's simple as long as you control things from soup to nuts. Yes, some "organic growth" was useful features. But a lot of it was useless features, or features that are now obsolete but can't be removed because someone somewhere is using them, and probably doesn't have enough time to re-test without the feature (true story).
- mike_hearn 11y ago
  Put together the packages, request a fixed port, disable the health checks (unless I had a file in the Apache root with the right name), start it up? I don't think Borg imposes all that many requirements on jobs, really, and the few it does can be disabled. Or at least could. But I guess we're probably wandering out of the area covered by the papers now.
- thockingoog 11y ago

thrownaway2424 11y ago

I don't strongly disagree with any of that. I was only pointing out that it's wrong to attribute a decade of history to something like cadvisor, which is brand new and does not draw on anything more than lessons learned from Google production. I also don't blame people for being confused about Google's container infrastructure. Google has issued blog posts in the past that were misleading (at best) about the relationship between Omega, Borg, and Kubernetes.

thockingoog 11y ago
Hmm, what was misleading? That certainly was never the intent. A decade or history lead to the knowledge that a particular style of monitoring was needed. That knowledge lead to cAdvisor. Is it perfect, of course not, but it fills a need and is directly derived from Google's experience. I fail to see how that misattribution, personally.