[TUHS] ATC/OSDI'21 joint keynote: It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware (Timothy Roscoe)

[John Cowan]

On Thu, Sep 16, 2021 at 7:15 PM Marshall Conover <marzhall.o at gmail.com>
wrote:


> I know a container I deploy will have
> everything it needs wherever it goes, and will be exactly the thing I
> built and tested.


Up to a point, Minister.  You can mount a scratch monkey, but you can't
mount a scratch Internet or a scratch AWS or a scratch Google.

> At one point the VM on
> which we were running those agents went down, and our stop-gap fix was
> to download and run a few copies of that container locally.
>

That's true if the container isn't too vulgar big.  I can run $EMPLOYER's
whole application on my laptop in the root environment, but running it in
Docker is too costly even though that's how it's deployed on AWS.


> from the adage "necessity is the mother of invention." People writing
> business logic today are targeting an OS-independent platform: the
> browser.


Most actual business logic is still in the back end, at least at my part of
the coal face.  The browser is more of a programmable platform as time goes
by, but it's still a Blit even if no longer just a 3270.


> Management -
> which in this case, means the world at large - demands new features,
> not unspecified heisen-benefits from redoing things that already work.
>

There is a pressure toward that.  But when $CLIENTS (who are a lot bigger
than $EMPLOYER) start to complain about how often the application they are
paying $$$$$$$ for falls over due to lack of robustness, things change.
Not everything can be startup-grade.
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