Configuration, performance, package management, reliability/robustness, security, monitoring, virtualization, and distributed computing. Those are the big probl

Configuration, performance, package management, reliability/robustness, security, monitoring, virtualization, and distributed computing. Those are the big problems and missing pieces that people doing systems level engineering are facing today. And, no coincidence, these are the things where you see the most repeated instances of tools that address these issues. Consider package management. You have an OS level package manager, you have OS level application management (on android, for example), you have node package management, you have ruby gems, you have perl and python packages, you have wordpress themes and plugins, etc. Obviously it doesn't make sense to have a single global package manager, but what about standards for package management? Competing package management infrastructures which serve as foundations for all these lower level systems? A mechanism for aggregating information and control for all of the package management sub-systems? As the article points out a lot of systems folks and OS folks are still retreading the same paths. They want to pave those paths, then build moving walkways, and so forth. That's all fine and good, but there's a lot of wilderness out there, and a lot of people are out in that wilderness hacking away with machetes and pickaxes building settlements, but for some reason most OS folks don't even imagine that roads can go there too.