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Containers in 2019: They're Calling It a Hypervisor Comeback

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Re: Containers in 2019: They're Calling It a Hypervisor Comeback

#131

Post by superflit »

no_wizard wrote: post #93
dopylitty wrote: post #52

I've had this sneaking but hard to articulate suspicion that datacenters, bare metal servers, VMs, operating systems, containers, OS processes, language VMs, and threads are all really attempts to abstract the same thing. You want to run business code in a way that's protected from other business code but also able to interact with other business code and data in a well defined way. I also have this sneaking suspicio…

What I’ve always failed to Understand is how FreeBSD jails[0] never got very popular (discounting the fact that FreeBSD isn’t very popular on the whole from what I can tell) but Docker is huge. I personally think jails are superior in implementation in that it requires no other abstractions on top of the OS. The only thing I can surmise is that Docker might have a better secure default, but improvements to Jails coul…

I am still waiting all the docker fans to acknowledge bhyve[1]

[1] - https://bhyve.org

Re: Containers in 2019: They're Calling It a Hypervisor Comeback

#133

Post by jayd16 »

sedachv wrote: post #116
jayd16 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPv6 saves you from setting up DNS on each instance and will do load balancing?

Depends on what you use DNS for. Because the /64 space is so large, and you have a very large, very flexible subnet above that, you can set up an address assignment scheme for non-public facing nodes where you do not need DNS, and you can integrate that scheme with your load balancer. See Coffeen's _IPv6 Address Planning_ for ideas.

That seems like a lot of work and you're ultimately not going to be able to use this in full deployment. Docker models and maps tobcloud infrastructure quite nicely and that's a reason it popular.

Re: Containers in 2019: They're Calling It a Hypervisor Comeback

#134

Post by Yetanfou »

user_error wrote: post #129
sedachv wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've had this sneaking but hard to articulate suspicion that datacenters, bare metal servers, VMs, operating systems, containers, OS processes, language VMs, and threads are all really attempts to abstract the same thing. There is a very easy way to articulate it: they are all ways of virtualizing different facilities. Unix processes virtualize the user-mode processor registers and the address space. POSIX threads…

> this is what naming things refers to in Phil Karlton's quote "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things," not to the literal naming of variables in computer programs That is mighty interesting. Do you happen to have a source for this? It's the first time I've heard it being put in this particular way.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/19836/has-phil-...

Several references to the quote "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things" can be found, such as Martin Fowler's blog and others.

I'm unable to find the source of this quote, has he ever said it?

- As his only son, and colleague with him at Netscape from 95-97, I can attest that my dad did indeed throw that quote around, on more than one occasion. I'm fairly confident that he originated it (he was fond of coming up with clever quippets), though I haven't been able to figure out how it disseminated so widely over the past couple of decades. I'll keep looking around in old web archives and mails to see if I can dig something up.

Re: Containers in 2019: They're Calling It a Hypervisor Comeback

#135

Post by panpanna »

naasking wrote: post #56
gtirloni wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind this tangent question... Is there a microkernel API that has more acceptance nowadays? In other words, where should anyone wanting to work on real world / enterprise systems based on microkernel look?

seL4: https://sel4.systems/ The kernel is even formally verified, and it's very widely deployed.

Define wildly.

The Okl4 kernel in iPhones is extremely limited in its functionality, you could probably run that code even without an Os. It could also be argued if in its current form it is really a microkernel. Furthermore, sel4 and okl4 are not the same product.

(nothing bad on sel4, I have used it myself and I personally know the people behind the project. But it's not what you think it is)

Re: Containers in 2019: They're Calling It a Hypervisor Comeback

#136

Post by sedachv »

sansnomme wrote: post #90
zzzcpan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's feasible in the same way bounds checking is feasible. Everything could have a capability token attached to it and checked. Compiler could generate all the language level checks, kernel could do OS level checks. Main program could have some built in capabilities and capabilities it gets from the other OS processes, it could then pass them or devise new ones to library functions, they could pass them to other libr…

But that means you have to upload raw source code. It's closer to Apple's app store deployment than to what current cloud hosting offers (arbitrary compute power for anything but crypto mining).

> But that means you have to upload raw source code.

And what is wrong with that? JavaScript source-code-only is by orders of magnitude the most popular and successful software distribution method.

Re: Containers in 2019: They're Calling It a Hypervisor Comeback

#137

Post by nicklarsennz »

naasking wrote: post #56
gtirloni wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind this tangent question... Is there a microkernel API that has more acceptance nowadays? In other words, where should anyone wanting to work on real world / enterprise systems based on microkernel look?

seL4: https://sel4.systems/ The kernel is even formally verified, and it's very widely deployed.

seL4 looks quite interesting. What use cases have you used it in?

Re: Containers in 2019: They're Calling It a Hypervisor Comeback

#138

Post by magicalhippo »

no_wizard wrote: post #93
dopylitty wrote: post #52

I've had this sneaking but hard to articulate suspicion that datacenters, bare metal servers, VMs, operating systems, containers, OS processes, language VMs, and threads are all really attempts to abstract the same thing. You want to run business code in a way that's protected from other business code but also able to interact with other business code and data in a well defined way. I also have this sneaking suspicio…

What I’ve always failed to Understand is how FreeBSD jails[0] never got very popular (discounting the fact that FreeBSD isn’t very popular on the whole from what I can tell) but Docker is huge. I personally think jails are superior in implementation in that it requires no other abstractions on top of the OS. The only thing I can surmise is that Docker might have a better secure default, but improvements to Jails coul…

I've tried a few times to get jails working but always stumbled over something. Last time it was inbound connections for a server. After several hours I gave up. There's iocage now, but this was well before that. And iocage still has issues.

Docker I could get up an running in less than an hour and it just worked.

Re: Containers in 2019: They're Calling It a Hypervisor Comeback

#139

Post by icebraining »

sedachv wrote: post #128
zbentley wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened because docker, in addition to an isolation system, also bundled a user friendly interface to a per-app persistent filesystem. No matter how many people sing the praises of isolation and security to Docker, I will continue to suspect that almost all of its adopters use it because packaging software with dependencies is hard, poorly understood, terribly tooled (looking at you, Python), and even more poor…

> No matter how many people sing the praises of isolation and security to Docker, I will continue to suspect that almost all of its adopters use it because packaging software with dependencies is hard, poorly understood, terribly tooled (looking at you, Python), and even more poorly executed in the vast majority of projects and companies. Here is a quote from Eberhard Wolff's _A Practical Guide to Continuous Delivery…

To be fair to Wolff, it's not uncommon for deb and rpm packages of complex daemons (e.g. postgres) to include shell scripts - postinst, preinst, etc - that makes changes to the system, and which do have to be coded in such a way to handle re-execution after partial failure. Taking my /var/cache/apt/ directory as a (poor) sample, about 1/3 of packages had such scripts.

Re: Containers in 2019: They're Calling It a Hypervisor Comeback

#140

Post by reaperducer »

dopylitty wrote: post #52

I've had this sneaking but hard to articulate suspicion that datacenters, bare metal servers, VMs, operating systems, containers, OS processes, language VMs, and threads are all really attempts to abstract the same thing. You want to run business code in a way that's protected from other business code but also able to interact with other business code and data in a well defined way. I also have this sneaking suspicio…

I also have this sneaking suspicion that new generations are re-inventing the wheel in a lot of ways.

Suspicion fades away, and the older you get, the more often you see this happen.

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