2 ms·

So it's AWS's version of CoreOS? I wish somebody'd take some VC or R&D money and build distributed computing features into the kernel itself, so we could quit

So it's AWS's version of CoreOS? I wish somebody'd take some VC or R&D money and build distributed computing features into the kernel itself, so we could quit wasting our collective engineering talent, time, money and energy on distributed applications that run on non-distributed-operating-systems. It's like nobody wants to work on creating a round wheel, so instead we're spending all our time building custom roads for square wheels.

johnmarcus 7y ago
Erlang is probably the closest thing to this, but unfortunately everything it runs also needs to be written in erlang. If erlang could run containers as processes it would take over the world, all of the features from kubernetes has been baked in since the late 90's.
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  The closest things really are distributed operating systems from the 70's and 80's, and cluster operating systems from the 90's, and 00's. Unfortunately, all of them were either research projects, proprietary products, or patches that never made it into the mainline kernel. Nobody has since tried to get the functionality into mainline, so people keep hacking together these non-standard pseudo-operating-systems and jumbles of disparate applications. You could eliminate 80% of the need for K8s by adding OS primitives to connect and operate namespaces and control groups between nodes, as well as native i/o (block, file, "N-way pipes") between nodes. Once that was done, systemd (or something like it) could manage services across an entire cluster. Applications could communicate between arbitrary nodes without any added functionality. Virtually all of the complexity would be in the kernel and systemd, so apps could be simpler and we wouldn't need 100 layers of userspace junk just to keep an app running on 3 nodes.

2 ms·

So it's AWS's version of CoreOS? I wish somebody'd take some VC or R&D money and build distributed computing features into the kernel itself, so we could quit

by peterwwillis 7y ago

johnmarcus 7y ago
Erlang is probably the closest thing to this, but unfortunately everything it runs also needs to be written in erlang. If erlang could run containers as processes it would take over the world, all of the features from kubernetes has been baked in since the late 90's.
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  The closest things really are distributed operating systems from the 70's and 80's, and cluster operating systems from the 90's, and 00's. Unfortunately, all of them were either research projects, proprietary products, or patches that never made it into the mainline kernel. Nobody has since tried to get the functionality into mainline, so people keep hacking together these non-standard pseudo-operating-systems and jumbles of disparate applications. You could eliminate 80% of the need for K8s by adding OS primitives to connect and operate namespaces and control groups between nodes, as well as native i/o (block, file, "N-way pipes") between nodes. Once that was done, systemd (or something like it) could manage services across an entire cluster. Applications could communicate between arbitrary nodes without any added functionality. Virtually all of the complexity would be in the kernel and systemd, so apps could be simpler and we wouldn't need 100 layers of userspace junk just to keep an app running on 3 nodes.