Windows has capabilities. It's the combination of handles (file, process, etc.) and access tokens. But you'll note no one is really deploying windows workload

Windows has capabilities. It's the combination of handles (file, process, etc.) and access tokens. But you'll note no one is really deploying windows workloads to the cloud. Why? Well, because you'd still have to build a framework for managing all those permissions, and it hasn't been done. Also, you might end up with SVCHOST problem, where you host many different services/apps/whatever in one very threaded process because you can. Capabilities aren't necessarily simpler. Especially if you can delegate them without controls -- now you have no idea what the actual running permissions are, only the cold start baseline. No, I think the permissions thing is a red herring. Very much on the contrary, I think workload division into coarse-grained containers are great for permissions because fine-grained access control is hard to manage. Of course, you can't destroy complexity, only move it around, so if you should end up with many coarse-grained access control units then you'll still have a fine-grained access control system in the end. Files aren't really a problem either. You can add metadata to files on Linux using xattrs (I've built a custom HTTP server that takes some response headers for static resources, like Content-Type, from xattrs). The problem you're alluding to is duck-typing as opposed to static typing. Yes, it's a problem -- people are lazy, so they don't type-tag everything in highly lazy typing systems. So what? Windows also has this problem, just a bit less so than Unix. Python and JS are all the rage, and their type systems are lazy and obnoxious. It's not a problem with Unix. It's a problem with humans. Lack of discipline. Honestly, there are very few people who could use Haskell as a shell! > Plenty of object models have come and gone; Yeah, mostly because they suck. The right model is Haskell's (and related languages'). > so we'll need some theory more powerful than anything we've had in the past ... I think that's Haskell (which is still evolving) and its ecosystem (ditto). But at the end of the day, you'll still have very complex metadata to manage. What I don't understand is how all your points tie into Kubernetes being today's Multics. Kubernetes isn't motivated by Unix permissions sucking. We had fancy ACLs in ZFS in Solaris and still also ended up having Zones (containers). You can totally build an application-layer cryptographic capability system, running each app as its own isolated user/container, and to some degree this is happening with OAuth and such things, but that isn't what everyone is doing, all the time. Kubernetes is most definitely not motivated by Unix files being un-typed either. I hope readers end up floating the other, more on-topic top-level comments in this thread back to the top.