[TUHS] Distributed systems, was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question"

Toby Thain toby at telegraphics.com.au
Sun Jan 19 06:40:41 AEST 2020


On 2020-01-18 3:24 PM, Adam Thornton wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jan 17, 2020, at 11:25 PM, Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I am convinced that large-scale modern compute centers would be run very differently, with fewer or at least lesser problems, if they were treated as a single system rather than as a bunch of single-user computers ssh'ed together.
>>
>> But history had other ideas.
> 
> So I’ve clearly got a dog in this fight (https://athornton.github.io/Tucson-Python-Dec-2019/ et al. (also mostly at athornton.github.io)) but I feel like Kubernetes is an interesting compromise in that space.
> 
> Admittedly, I come to this not only from a Unix/Linux background but an IBM VM background, but:
> 
> 1) containerization is a necessary but not sufficient first step

Exactly.

> 2) black magic to handle the internal networking and endpoint exposure through fairly simple configuration on the user’s part is essential
> 3) abstractions to describe resources (the current enumerated-objects quota stuff is clunky but sufficient; the CPU/Memory quota stuff is fine), and
> 4) an automated lifecycle manager

Right, I think we use the terms "orchestration", "service discovery", etc.

--T

> 
> taken together give you a really nifty platform for defining complex applications via composition, which (IMHO) is one of the fundamental wins of Unix, although in this case, it’s really _not_ very analogous to plugging pipeline stages together.
> 
> Note that _running_ Kubernetes is still a pain, so unless running data centers is your job, just rent capacity from someone else’s managed Kubernetes service.
> 
> Adam
> 



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