Static website generators.
This might be a joke but there's plenty of room for a good static wordpress alternative that focuses on bloggers instead of developers.
Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?
11–20 of 115 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?
#12> Nowadays it seems like there's nothing missing. There's lots of things missing. There's just nothing missing in established categories. Why would there be? Start your own category, create software for it, then convince everyone that the category is important.
Great advice! I'd venture that managing large files is an unsolved problem. It's a hack in most version control systems, and uploading/downloading files from a host, even S3, is a slow, serial process. Same for checksumming. Network speeds have more than caught up, and large files are a frequent process bottleneck. Something that makes it easy to manage and consume large files could be a big deal. It probably would require a new application protocol, maybe even a new filesystem similar to XFS.
Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?
#13There's two ways to "fill a gap", either you create a gap that needs filling or you make an existing solution better. You don't see anything missing because you aren't looking at things from this perspective.
Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?
#14I want a distributed (not cloud) file system that handles many files and WAN latency (i.e. not HDFS). It might be a cross between Git and BitTorrent.
It feels like deb repos, PyPI, NPM, CPAN, CRAN, etc. should be put in there, with the addition of binaries for popular architectures. And probably Docker-like images, although I think if they are not opaque blobs, it would be better for rsync-like differential compression (which Git implicitly provides).
There will be some small files and some big files. I want it to be like Git so I can clone locally, not just go to the cloud. The way that Git is trivial to set up and clone through SSH is nice too.
It probably has to have a notion of "user", like a local file system. (This makes the problem a lot harder; git doesn't really have permissions.)
BTW Julia's package manager just used git, but I watched a talk that said this ended up being a really bad idea, especially on Windows.
As far as I understand IPFS has some of these properties. Has anybody used it? Could I use it for the package repository use case?
I don't know much about it, but Project Atomic sounds similar too: https://www.projectatomic.io/
Any other projects that seem like a close fit?
BTW I think this would also be useful in the data center, as some companies like Twitter apparently use BitTorrent in data centers to start large jobs quickly (i.e replicate the same 500 MB binary to 1000 machines).
Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?
#15Serving machine learning models in production is still something that appears not to have an obvious correct solution.
Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?
#16Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?
#1710 years ago, I learned about the idea of elastic infrastructure. Services with load balancers in front of them, hosts that come and go easily, a structured way to communicate between services.
At the time, that was nginx + manual autoscaling, then it was ELBs and autoscaling groups, now it's kubernetes and containers, maybe hosted. It's still not there.
I'm excited about the software that makes that operable at scale. It seems like a service mesh is a good idea. It seems like mutual security between services is a good idea. It seems like storing routing configuration in a separate control plane that is executed in a data plane like Envoy is a good idea.
There's a bag of software at CNCF that's loosely organized around this, but I don't think the "just deploy some code, it can scale and you can have tons of services doing that with good visibility and operability" is quite there. I'm really exicted about Envoy, but I don't think there's a good control plane for it. I'm part of a company that's working on a commercial implementation (turbinelabs.io), and Istio is in a similar space.
There's still work to be done!
Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?
#18An open-source platform for self-hosting function-as-a-service - something that provides the tooling for easily saying "deploy this function, auto scale it, route HTTP traffic to it, now atomically replace it with this new version" without having to lock yourself in to Google/AWS/Azure.
OpenWhisk is a bit clunky, but it does exist! https://openwhisk.apache.org/
Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?
#19Machine learning model management and serving service.
I haven't seen a decent open source framework that makes it easy to package a trained model with prepocessing and postprocessing steps and deploy it behind an API.
Adding performance tracking and model validation on top of that would be great.
Then there are things like queuing/batching and autoscaling.
Closes thing that comes to mind right now is tensorflow serving and their k8s stuff (which it looks like they just renamed to tf-operator and moved to kubeflow org https://github.com/kubeflow/tf-operator)
Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?
#20I want a distributed (not cloud) file system that handles many files and WAN latency (i.e. not HDFS). It might be a cross between Git and BitTorrent. It feels like deb repos, PyPI, NPM, CPAN, CRAN, etc. should be put in there, with the addition of binaries for popular architectures. And probably Docker-like images, although I think if they are not opaque blobs, it would be better for rsync-like differential compressi…
Syncthing is pretty nice. It's not a filesystem, and it doesn't deal with conflicts particularly well, but it's as close to a cross-platform, distributed solution that "just works" as I've been able to find.