6 ms·

Unix and Microservice Platforms

97 points by brandonbloom 5y ago

dotcommand 5y ago
> "Code the Perimeter" is the key insight of Kevin Greer's fabulous 2016 analysis of why Unix beat Multics Brian Kernighan's "UNIX: A History and a Memoir" delves into why multics failed and unix was created and opinions on why unix succeeded ( something they really didn't anticipate ). It's a great book, broader than just unix - bell labs history, the people involved, computer history, etc.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Very interesting also for insight into "what were they trying to do?". In several cases this was actually "facilitate printing bell labs technical papers without paying a printing company". Also interesting that the first part of Unix to be developed, and it was done as a stand alone project not with the goal to become a full OS, was the filesystem.
  - foobarian 5y ago
    It's amazing how much of modern computing infrastructure was inspired by printers. Richard Stallman's almost entire life's work comes to mind.
    - macintux 5y ago
      And laser printing was a key factor in the Mac’s early success.
      - smhenderson 5y ago
        And now a favorite goal of small/medium business is to use computers to go completely paperless.
    - giantrobot 5y ago
      Consider big companies before departmental printers. A memo would be typed and then have to go to the reprographics department for copies or typing pool. Anything more complex than a memo would need to go to an outside printer to be typeset and printed. So you're looking at hours to days (weeks in the case of technical documentation) turn around time. All the labor was also very expensive. Departmental printing could cut the turn around time to minutes or hours and reduce the manual labor significantly. This got cheaper and more accessible with desktop printing. While e-mail is often abused anymore it's much more manageable than the reams of paper even relatively small companies had to deal with just to communicate internally.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    That was never the goal of UNIX per se, rather the way Dennis and Richtie managed to get hold of funding and management support to keep going at it. > When the Computing Sciences Research Center wanted to use Unix on a machine larger than the PDP-7, while another department needed a word processor, Thompson and Ritchie added text processing capabilities to Unix and received funding for a PDP-11/20.[5] For the first time in 1970, the Unix operating system was officially named and ran on the PDP-11/20. A text-formatting program called roff and a text editor were added. All three were written in PDP-11/20 assembly language. Bell Labs used this initial text-processing system, consisting of Unix, roff, and the editor, for text processing of patent applications. Roff soon evolved into troff, the first electronic publishing program with full typesetting capability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix
    - dboreham 5y ago
      True, but if you read Brian's book, he provides more details and color: nroff was the first real Unix application, and the first PDP-11 was purchased by the patent dept on the understanding that the Unix group would develop nroff. roff pre-dates Unix and didn't have the capabilities required by the patent group (automatically add line numbers to printed documents).
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Multics failed for Bell Labs, it was quite useful for others, and in a DoD security assessemnt even proved more secure than UNIX thanks to PL/I. https://multicians.org/myths.html https://multicians.org/myths.html
  - anthk 5y ago
    Without reading this comment's nickname I already knew it would be... you. JK, if Multics has TCP/IP and VT100 support (or even raw serial support), IRC, Gopher, E-Mail, News, and Telnet clients could be backported perfectly for Multics. IF there's a Z Interpreter for Tops-20 on the KA10, I think a computer capable on running Multics should be able to run Zork.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      It has, ARPANET had Multics servers, https://multicians.org/mx-net.html https://multicians.org/mx-net.html
richardfey 5y ago
Don't microservices using shared code correspond to going back to a monolith in disguise?
- dboreham 5y ago
  In the same sense that a set of C binaries that uses libc is a monolith?
  - richardfey 5y ago
    Only if your company develops the equivalent of libc and it is clearly in scope for its business.
- azaras 5y ago
  No. Sharing code is good. Sharing memory bad.
  - jjtheblunt 5y ago
    perfectly said!
  - discreteevent 5y ago
    Sharing memory is pretty easy when you have a garbage collector. Even if you have concurrency you can use messaging without having to put the communicating components into separate processes. And having separate garbage collected virtual machines wastes a lot of memory if you want to have enough headroom for performance in each one.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Not when sharing memory is done over OS IPC mechanisms. Which is what you want if the application is to be resilient to crashes and exploits from dynamicallly loaded code.
flerovium 5y ago
I would like to see the details of what primitives the author considers important (the "columns" of the perimeter diagram).
- brandonbloom 5y ago
  Hi, author here. My writing backlog includes a post defining what "good" looks like for a web service. I don't think most organizations are doing it well, or have their priorities straight. Rumor has it that there is a 30+ page checklist if you work at AWS and want to launch a new service. Meanwhile, CloudFormation support still trails most new service launches and remains completely unavailable for many old services. These things suggest strongly that they are coding the area, not the perimeter.
  - flerovium 5y ago
    In many ways, AWS's insistence on proprietary vs. universal open-source and the lack of interoperability with other cloud providers is itself "coding the area", turning an O(N+M) problem into an O(N*M) one.
  - _sheep 5y ago
    AWS's console UI is a pretty good sign of "coding the area" as well. So many subtle inconsistencies in the UI with navigation structure, pagination, filtering/search with all of their different services.
overtomanu 5y ago
Doesn't service mesh seem similar to enterprise bus in SOA?
- gunapologist99 5y ago
  exactly. what's old is new again.
pjmlp 5y ago
> See, the brilliance of Unix didn't stop at functional orthogonality, they also used C: A high-level programming language, as compared to machine-specific assembly code. Once Unix started getting ported to new hardware architectures, the two-dimensional implementation matrix becomes three-dimensional. Yeah, like plenty of other OSes since the late 1950's. Multics was also written in an high level language, PL/I. If anything, I am looking forward to the cloud platforms to replace UNIX. It doesn't matter what AWS runs on, as long as my language runtime, or Kubernetes runs there. UNIX, hypervisor, Linux, Windows, bare metal,...., I just don't care.
- miohtama 5y ago
  Google has taken a stepmto this direction with Fuchsia. To replace the Linux kernel under Android/ChromeOS and maybe later the servers. But it will be a massive undertaking due to massive sunken cost in the UNIX legacy.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Yes, but if no one ever spends the money, it will never change. The main reason why alternatives failed so far it wasn't for lack of technical capabilities, rather companies not willing to put the money in for the long road it takes to reboot everything. At least the majority of userspace applications are moving into the right direction, specially those being deployed on cloud environments on top of orchestrated runtimes, or the mobile phone apps.
    - formerly_proven 5y ago
      Linux isn't Unix: commercial Unix already got obliterated by Linux (and the dotcom bubble, Itanium). Completely different development model, vastly different capabilities.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Yeah, I forgot about that, it is just a kernel that happens to be POSIX compatible.
thom 5y ago
Some truly baffling dataviz in this article, which really underlines the 'do one thing well, stick to text' message of the article.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Animats 5y ago
Multics required unusual hardware that was expensive at the time. The hardware was abandoned by GE and taken over by Honeywell. Honeywell, which made thermostats then and makes thermostats now, was never a major player in computing. The big advantage of UNIX was that it runs on vanilla hardware. UNIX is all wrong for microservices. Interprocess communication barely existed at first, and it's still mediocre. QNX did this right, with a true message-passing architecture, and a message-oriented network protocol. (Reliable, any-length message, not just raw UDP packets.) QNX continues to power many real-time systems, passing messages around.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  The big advantage of UNIX was that AT&T wasn't allowed to sell it, and it was basically free beer available for a symbolic price, then the UNIX V6 annotated book did the rest. If UNIX was closed source, sold at the same price as the competition, whatever hardware it run on would have not mattered at all.
skissane 5y ago
> Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface. I wish they'd invented a simple structured data model, like JSON, and exchanged that rather than plain text.

97 points by brandonbloom 5y ago

> "Code the Perimeter" is the key insight of Kevin Greer's fabulous 2016 analysis of why Unix beat Multics Brian Kernighan's "UNIX: A History and a Memoir" delves into why multics failed and unix was created and opinions on why unix succeeded ( something they really didn't anticipate ). It's a great book, broader than just unix - bell labs history, the people involved, computer history, etc.

dboreham 5y ago
Very interesting also for insight into "what were they trying to do?". In several cases this was actually "facilitate printing bell labs technical papers without paying a printing company". Also interesting that the first part of Unix to be developed, and it was done as a stand alone project not with the goal to become a full OS, was the filesystem.
- foobarian 5y ago
  It's amazing how much of modern computing infrastructure was inspired by printers. Richard Stallman's almost entire life's work comes to mind.
  - macintux 5y ago
    And laser printing was a key factor in the Mac’s early success.
    - smhenderson 5y ago
      And now a favorite goal of small/medium business is to use computers to go completely paperless.
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    Consider big companies before departmental printers. A memo would be typed and then have to go to the reprographics department for copies or typing pool. Anything more complex than a memo would need to go to an outside printer to be typeset and printed. So you're looking at hours to days (weeks in the case of technical documentation) turn around time. All the labor was also very expensive. Departmental printing could cut the turn around time to minutes or hours and reduce the manual labor significantly. This got cheaper and more accessible with desktop printing. While e-mail is often abused anymore it's much more manageable than the reams of paper even relatively small companies had to deal with just to communicate internally.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  That was never the goal of UNIX per se, rather the way Dennis and Richtie managed to get hold of funding and management support to keep going at it. > When the Computing Sciences Research Center wanted to use Unix on a machine larger than the PDP-7, while another department needed a word processor, Thompson and Ritchie added text processing capabilities to Unix and received funding for a PDP-11/20.[5] For the first time in 1970, the Unix operating system was officially named and ran on the PDP-11/20. A text-formatting program called roff and a text editor were added. All three were written in PDP-11/20 assembly language. Bell Labs used this initial text-processing system, consisting of Unix, roff, and the editor, for text processing of patent applications. Roff soon evolved into troff, the first electronic publishing program with full typesetting capability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix
  - dboreham 5y ago
    True, but if you read Brian's book, he provides more details and color: nroff was the first real Unix application, and the first PDP-11 was purchased by the patent dept on the understanding that the Unix group would develop nroff. roff pre-dates Unix and didn't have the capabilities required by the patent group (automatically add line numbers to printed documents).
pjmlp 5y ago
Multics failed for Bell Labs, it was quite useful for others, and in a DoD security assessemnt even proved more secure than UNIX thanks to PL/I. https://multicians.org/myths.html https://multicians.org/myths.html
- anthk 5y ago
  Without reading this comment's nickname I already knew it would be... you. JK, if Multics has TCP/IP and VT100 support (or even raw serial support), IRC, Gopher, E-Mail, News, and Telnet clients could be backported perfectly for Multics. IF there's a Z Interpreter for Tops-20 on the KA10, I think a computer capable on running Multics should be able to run Zork.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    It has, ARPANET had Multics servers, https://multicians.org/mx-net.html https://multicians.org/mx-net.html

richardfey 5y ago

Don't microservices using shared code correspond to going back to a monolith in disguise?

dboreham 5y ago
In the same sense that a set of C binaries that uses libc is a monolith?
- richardfey 5y ago
  Only if your company develops the equivalent of libc and it is clearly in scope for its business.
azaras 5y ago
No. Sharing code is good. Sharing memory bad.
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  perfectly said!
- discreteevent 5y ago
  Sharing memory is pretty easy when you have a garbage collector. Even if you have concurrency you can use messaging without having to put the communicating components into separate processes. And having separate garbage collected virtual machines wastes a lot of memory if you want to have enough headroom for performance in each one.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Not when sharing memory is done over OS IPC mechanisms. Which is what you want if the application is to be resilient to crashes and exploits from dynamicallly loaded code.

flerovium 5y ago

I would like to see the details of what primitives the author considers important (the "columns" of the perimeter diagram).

brandonbloom 5y ago
Hi, author here. My writing backlog includes a post defining what "good" looks like for a web service. I don't think most organizations are doing it well, or have their priorities straight. Rumor has it that there is a 30+ page checklist if you work at AWS and want to launch a new service. Meanwhile, CloudFormation support still trails most new service launches and remains completely unavailable for many old services. These things suggest strongly that they are coding the area, not the perimeter.
- flerovium 5y ago
  In many ways, AWS's insistence on proprietary vs. universal open-source and the lack of interoperability with other cloud providers is itself "coding the area", turning an O(N+M) problem into an O(N*M) one.
- _sheep 5y ago
  AWS's console UI is a pretty good sign of "coding the area" as well. So many subtle inconsistencies in the UI with navigation structure, pagination, filtering/search with all of their different services.

overtomanu 5y ago

Doesn't service mesh seem similar to enterprise bus in SOA?

gunapologist99 5y ago
exactly. what's old is new again.

pjmlp 5y ago

> See, the brilliance of Unix didn't stop at functional orthogonality, they also used C: A high-level programming language, as compared to machine-specific assembly code. Once Unix started getting ported to new hardware architectures, the two-dimensional implementation matrix becomes three-dimensional. Yeah, like plenty of other OSes since the late 1950's. Multics was also written in an high level language, PL/I. If anything, I am looking forward to the cloud platforms to replace UNIX. It doesn't matter what AWS runs on, as long as my language runtime, or Kubernetes runs there. UNIX, hypervisor, Linux, Windows, bare metal,...., I just don't care.

miohtama 5y ago
Google has taken a stepmto this direction with Fuchsia. To replace the Linux kernel under Android/ChromeOS and maybe later the servers. But it will be a massive undertaking due to massive sunken cost in the UNIX legacy.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Yes, but if no one ever spends the money, it will never change. The main reason why alternatives failed so far it wasn't for lack of technical capabilities, rather companies not willing to put the money in for the long road it takes to reboot everything. At least the majority of userspace applications are moving into the right direction, specially those being deployed on cloud environments on top of orchestrated runtimes, or the mobile phone apps.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    Linux isn't Unix: commercial Unix already got obliterated by Linux (and the dotcom bubble, Itanium). Completely different development model, vastly different capabilities.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Yeah, I forgot about that, it is just a kernel that happens to be POSIX compatible.

thom 5y ago

Some truly baffling dataviz in this article, which really underlines the 'do one thing well, stick to text' message of the article.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Animats 5y ago

Multics required unusual hardware that was expensive at the time. The hardware was abandoned by GE and taken over by Honeywell. Honeywell, which made thermostats then and makes thermostats now, was never a major player in computing. The big advantage of UNIX was that it runs on vanilla hardware. UNIX is all wrong for microservices. Interprocess communication barely existed at first, and it's still mediocre. QNX did this right, with a true message-passing architecture, and a message-oriented network protocol. (Reliable, any-length message, not just raw UDP packets.) QNX continues to power many real-time systems, passing messages around.

pjmlp 5y ago
The big advantage of UNIX was that AT&T wasn't allowed to sell it, and it was basically free beer available for a symbolic price, then the UNIX V6 annotated book did the rest. If UNIX was closed source, sold at the same price as the competition, whatever hardware it run on would have not mattered at all.

skissane 5y ago

> Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface. I wish they'd invented a simple structured data model, like JSON, and exchanged that rather than plain text.