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The article says: "Unlike essentially every other cloud computing platform I know of, it doesn’t use containers or virtual machines. " Surely there were others

The article says: "Unlike essentially every other cloud computing platform I know of, it doesn’t use containers or virtual machines. " Surely there were others before like Azure Service Fabric ?

black-tea 8y ago
Yeah, and that still exists doesn't it?
wmf 8y ago
Google App Engine also originally sort of relied on language sandboxing but it still had a separate process for each tenant.
inopinatus 8y ago
I’ve seen the automated provisioning and scheduling of jails and zones for application deployment, pretty much since they were invented. Automated UID provisioning for isolation and resource constraint and application package deployment, at least since the nineties. Ultimately most of us want to put files on a server and start a process. There’s just an endless variety of constantly re-invented ways to do that. Choose your scaffolding.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Jails and Zones are essentially containers - they're ways of isolating process from each other by basically constraining what they can see and change, at the kernel level. What they're describing is actually running code from multiple people on the same process.
  - inopinatus 8y ago
    A process is any instance of a program that's being executed. That definition doesn't change whether it's a program running as an ordinary Unix process, as an Isolate in a V8 runtime in a container on a virtual machine on a bare-metal blade in a DC rack, or as a hypothetical MIPS-like CPU on my whiteboard. By "choose your scaffolding", I'm just saying "how much of the OS kernel would you like to re-invent?" That isn't a wholly cynical position. Doing so might introduce new capabilities or cost efficiencies, which seems to be Cloudflare's pitch. But very often we get excited by the possibilities and lose sight of the tons of additional stuff now required to achieve quite simple things. In the worst case (e.g. VMware) we end up re-inventing hardware abstraction, scheduling, networking, memory management, and filesystems i.e. most of the damn kernel. Docker is a less egregious offender but still deserving of the "too much scaffolding" label. In the very best outcome, the capability gets stripped down to the core enhancement and pushed back into the expectations for a base OS, which is for example why practically every OS now comes with a hypervisor and a container mechanism.
Twirrim 8y ago
Oracle provides bare metal instances on demand on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform. There's literally no hypervisor or anything in the way. Other cloud providers also have bare metal instances as well.... it really seems such a bizarre claim that they made.
- discodave 8y ago
  They are implicitly talking about Serverless / FaaS from other cloud platforms. Lambda, Google/Azure functions, arguably Google App Engine etc.

The article says: "Unlike essentially every other cloud computing platform I know of, it doesn’t use containers or virtual machines. " Surely there were others before like Azure Service Fabric ?

black-tea 8y ago

Yeah, and that still exists doesn't it?

wmf 8y ago

Google App Engine also originally sort of relied on language sandboxing but it still had a separate process for each tenant.

inopinatus 8y ago

I’ve seen the automated provisioning and scheduling of jails and zones for application deployment, pretty much since they were invented. Automated UID provisioning for isolation and resource constraint and application package deployment, at least since the nineties. Ultimately most of us want to put files on a server and start a process. There’s just an endless variety of constantly re-invented ways to do that. Choose your scaffolding.

icebraining 8y ago
Jails and Zones are essentially containers - they're ways of isolating process from each other by basically constraining what they can see and change, at the kernel level. What they're describing is actually running code from multiple people on the same process.
- inopinatus 8y ago
  A process is any instance of a program that's being executed. That definition doesn't change whether it's a program running as an ordinary Unix process, as an Isolate in a V8 runtime in a container on a virtual machine on a bare-metal blade in a DC rack, or as a hypothetical MIPS-like CPU on my whiteboard. By "choose your scaffolding", I'm just saying "how much of the OS kernel would you like to re-invent?" That isn't a wholly cynical position. Doing so might introduce new capabilities or cost efficiencies, which seems to be Cloudflare's pitch. But very often we get excited by the possibilities and lose sight of the tons of additional stuff now required to achieve quite simple things. In the worst case (e.g. VMware) we end up re-inventing hardware abstraction, scheduling, networking, memory management, and filesystems i.e. most of the damn kernel. Docker is a less egregious offender but still deserving of the "too much scaffolding" label. In the very best outcome, the capability gets stripped down to the core enhancement and pushed back into the expectations for a base OS, which is for example why practically every OS now comes with a hypervisor and a container mechanism.

Twirrim 8y ago

Oracle provides bare metal instances on demand on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform. There's literally no hypervisor or anything in the way. Other cloud providers also have bare metal instances as well.... it really seems such a bizarre claim that they made.

discodave 8y ago
They are implicitly talking about Serverless / FaaS from other cloud platforms. Lambda, Google/Azure functions, arguably Google App Engine etc.