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It gives you the bare minimum you need to schedule and start containerized workloads and leaves the rest to however you want to build and deploy your software

It gives you the bare minimum you need to schedule and start containerized workloads and leaves the rest to however you want to build and deploy your software Isn't this a bit of pushing the problem somewhere else? It seems that complexity will be "load balanced" to all the containers owners, which is great for infrastructure owners but does it "solve" the underlying problem (as it's stated in the article)?

stresler 12y ago
Yes, exactly. That is what the final sentence was meant to indicate, "We’re moving past the days where we take an operating system off the shelf and plug things into it until it can serve our application and into the days of purpose built OSes that push software complexity into the realm of software engineer." I wasn't trying to indicate that we 'solved' this, but rather that the approach of managing software in the OS layer was putting it in the wrong place. Configuration management is definitely still a problem. But I think handling it in a compartmentalized area separate from the base OS makes sense. Thanks for the feedback.
abhay_agarwal 12y ago
Container-friendly OSes are definitely the future. While CoreOS isn't the only one (Atomic, Photon, Snappy), there's very little need for most OS features that we traditionally expect in servers when lightweight containers wrap all our applications, and cluster schedulers manage failover. As for load-balancing the problem, there actually is added complexity in new architectures because we add a layer of orchestration on top. However, that layer on top is becoming more and more necessary, so it makes sense to move a lot of functionality out of the OS layer. If you want an example, think about how modern disk systems expect JBOD instead of RAID. When there is innovation on top, the underlying system can become simpler.
digi_owl 11y ago
Seems like a trend these days. Tired of dealing with a hairball of code? Put it up a layer and let them handle it instead... I'm seeing it with TTYs, i'm seeing it with mice, it seems to be going on all over the place...

stresler 12y ago

Yes, exactly. That is what the final sentence was meant to indicate, "We’re moving past the days where we take an operating system off the shelf and plug things into it until it can serve our application and into the days of purpose built OSes that push software complexity into the realm of software engineer." I wasn't trying to indicate that we 'solved' this, but rather that the approach of managing software in the OS layer was putting it in the wrong place. Configuration management is definitely still a problem. But I think handling it in a compartmentalized area separate from the base OS makes sense. Thanks for the feedback.

abhay_agarwal 12y ago

Container-friendly OSes are definitely the future. While CoreOS isn't the only one (Atomic, Photon, Snappy), there's very little need for most OS features that we traditionally expect in servers when lightweight containers wrap all our applications, and cluster schedulers manage failover. As for load-balancing the problem, there actually is added complexity in new architectures because we add a layer of orchestration on top. However, that layer on top is becoming more and more necessary, so it makes sense to move a lot of functionality out of the OS layer. If you want an example, think about how modern disk systems expect JBOD instead of RAID. When there is innovation on top, the underlying system can become simpler.

digi_owl 11y ago

Seems like a trend these days. Tired of dealing with a hairball of code? Put it up a layer and let them handle it instead... I'm seeing it with TTYs, i'm seeing it with mice, it seems to be going on all over the place...