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

[Bakul Shah]

On Sep 16, 2021, at 12:34 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 
> It's my opinion that the whole container thing sort of started as a "we
> can't secure the underlying system so we'll build something secure on top"
> combined with "it's no fun to fix the unnecessary incompatible mess among
> virtually identical systems that we've made so we'll build a new fix-it
> layer" ideologies.  How long until problems are found with containers
> it's decided that the way to fix it is to build "safe deposit boxes" that
> run in container?  Is there ever an end in sight?

Recall that previously sysadmins used programs such as ghost to image a
system. A completely operational system with all the required software
could be created fairly quickly with minimum configuration. If your
h/w crashed, you can get up and running fairly quickly on a new machine
(provided your unique bits were backed up & restored). The same thing
could be done for server machines. By minimizing differences you can
apply security patches or put new machines in service quickly. A server
machine needs much more than the main service program before it can
be put in real service but machines providing the same service need
pretty much the same things.

When VMs and containers started getting used, the same model could
be used for provisioning them. The docker folks simplified this
further. Now you can spin up new servers almost trivially (even if
later tooling via Kubernetes and such got quite complicated). Seems
to me, this provisioning of whole systems is what users of technologies
such as jail never quite got it.

A couple of points on this: 1) I think this can be simplified even
further if one can rely on a fast control plane connection by basically
lazily pulling in the contents of each container. 2) If the underlying
system provides a capability architecture, you can probably achieve the
exact same functionality without containers as the required "many worlds"
functionality is already built in. 

-- Bakul