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> - The entire business model of cloud computing is maximizing tenants-per-server this is not exactly true. the business model is to maximize the revenue per

> - The entire business model of cloud computing is maximizing tenants-per-server this is not exactly true. the business model is to maximize the revenue per server, not the number of tenants. this can be done in a number of ways.

chatmasta 12y ago
Good point. Of course, one of those ways is by charging the same price-per-tenant but increasing the number of tenants-per-server. If multiple companies do this, we should expect the price-per-tenant floor to decrease.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  I liken containers to adding an extra row of seats on a commercial aircraft. Right now the airline (host) operates one aircraft (server) and can fit X number of seats on it (split due to both consumption but also overhead from the seat's depth (hypervisor overhead)). If containers have lower overhead than hypervisors then it would be akin to an airline buying thinner seats and getting an extra row in. However it does remain to be seen how much more efficient containers are over hypervisors, and also how secure they are (there are lot's of unanswered questions on the security front).
  - derefr 12y ago
    I don't think most people are comparing containers to hypervisors (VMs); they're comparing using just VMs to using containers on top of VMs. Especially, they're comparing running one-VM-from-some-IaaS per workload, to running several of those workloads (possibly from multiple tenants) on top of the same VM-from-some-IaaS. If it wasn't insane to run a hypervisor within a hypervisor, this platform war would have started years ago, with Heroku taking AWS VMs and splitting them into tiny Heroku VMs.
simonpantzare 12y ago
My understanding of Amazon's new container service is that it lets users spawn a bunch of instances that the service manages (job scheduling and so on). This is not maximizing tenants per server nor maximizing revenue per server, IMO, as it mainly lets users increase the workload per instance. Without the container service, unless they run the similar infrastructure themselves, users would have to run additional instances to have the same isolation and ease of deployment (if they use Puppet, Chef, Ansible, or whatnot instead of some Docker cluster management software).

chatmasta 12y ago

Good point. Of course, one of those ways is by charging the same price-per-tenant but increasing the number of tenants-per-server. If multiple companies do this, we should expect the price-per-tenant floor to decrease.

Someone1234 12y ago
I liken containers to adding an extra row of seats on a commercial aircraft. Right now the airline (host) operates one aircraft (server) and can fit X number of seats on it (split due to both consumption but also overhead from the seat's depth (hypervisor overhead)). If containers have lower overhead than hypervisors then it would be akin to an airline buying thinner seats and getting an extra row in. However it does remain to be seen how much more efficient containers are over hypervisors, and also how secure they are (there are lot's of unanswered questions on the security front).
- derefr 12y ago
  I don't think most people are comparing containers to hypervisors (VMs); they're comparing using just VMs to using containers on top of VMs. Especially, they're comparing running one-VM-from-some-IaaS per workload, to running several of those workloads (possibly from multiple tenants) on top of the same VM-from-some-IaaS. If it wasn't insane to run a hypervisor within a hypervisor, this platform war would have started years ago, with Heroku taking AWS VMs and splitting them into tiny Heroku VMs.

simonpantzare 12y ago

My understanding of Amazon's new container service is that it lets users spawn a bunch of instances that the service manages (job scheduling and so on). This is not maximizing tenants per server nor maximizing revenue per server, IMO, as it mainly lets users increase the workload per instance. Without the container service, unless they run the similar infrastructure themselves, users would have to run additional instances to have the same isolation and ease of deployment (if they use Puppet, Chef, Ansible, or whatnot instead of some Docker cluster management software).