Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We are still early with the cloud

erikbern.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 202 posts

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#121

Post by gumby »

gwm83 wrote: post #54
crazygringo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

S3 is a transparent network filesystem. Unix is only the paradigm for computing servers. Which makes sense because different apps have wildly different ways of scaling. There's no effective paradigm for abstracting away 1,000's of CPUs in a general purpose way. I really don't have any idea what you're looking for here, that is possible, that cloud services don't already do.

S3, yes a network accessible FS. Unix - only is a telling word - it is the /defining/ paradigm for that. Is there a better one yet? 1000 CPUs? I mean, uh Hadoop, spark, etc etc. What?

> Unix - only is a telling word - it is the /defining/ paradigm for that.

Don’t be ridiculous. We had networked distributed file systems over both the arpanet and lans before Unix even had networking. I even mentioned this in my root comment.

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#122

Post by vbezhenar »

hinkley wrote: post #30
gumby wrote: post #7

It's crazy and destructive that we are still using the unix paradigm in the cloud. In the 70s we have transparent network fileststems, and by the 80s I had a more advanced cloud-native environment at PARC than is available today.* The Lispms were not quite as cloud native as that, but still you could have the impression that you just sat down at a terminal and had immediate window into an underlying "cloud" reality,…

People forget that a good deal of “cloud” logic existed in a form on mainframes as well.

Mainframes are very expensive. You can buy mainframe with very fast CPU and RAM interconnect and scale it by buying more hardware. Or you can spend 100x less and buy a number of server blades. Interconnect will be very slow, so you can't just run some kind of abstracted OS, you need to run separate OS on every server blade, you need to design your software with that slow interconnect in mind. But in the end it's still 100x cheaper and it's worth it.

Also mainframes have growth limit. You can buy very powerful ones, but you can't buy one that's as powerful as entire datacenter of server blades.

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#123

Post by fragmede »

crazygringo wrote: post #11
gumby wrote: post #7

It's crazy and destructive that we are still using the unix paradigm in the cloud. In the 70s we have transparent network fileststems, and by the 80s I had a more advanced cloud-native environment at PARC than is available today.* The Lispms were not quite as cloud native as that, but still you could have the impression that you just sat down at a terminal and had immediate window into an underlying "cloud" reality,…

S3 is a transparent network filesystem. Unix is only the paradigm for computing servers. Which makes sense because different apps have wildly different ways of scaling. There's no effective paradigm for abstracting away 1,000's of CPUs in a general purpose way. I really don't have any idea what you're looking for here, that is possible, that cloud services don't already do.

The paradigm for abstracting away a thousand CPUs is AWS Lambda/GCP or Azure functions/K8s' implementation of serverless. It's not a total drop in replacement because a plain lift-and-shift can't change your paradigm, but cloud functions are very much a Cloud 2.0 (or at least 1.5) paradigm.

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#124

Post by jcims »

The HN conversation yesterday about the complexity of the proton, in particular how we poke and prod at it to suss out its qualities and quantities, got me thinking about the subatomic particles of my personal subjective conscious experience.

We can trace, with quite a bit of precision, how a certain photon cocktail results in me perceiving the orange title bar at the top of HN. But where's the orange paint in my brain? What is it made of and how could we inspect it like we inspect the guts of a proton? And furthermore, where's the camera that puts all of those particles of paint onto the same stage? We know where the visual cortex is, yes, but where's the camera that can see the whole stage at one time?

That part, the integration of all of our perception into a single 'stage', is where I've long felt there has to be some kind of quantum or possibly field effect at play. Then I wondered if it might actually be possible for there to be an 'afterlife' of sorts in which the quantum relationship between particles is sustained beyond our life.

Dunno. Trippy to think about though.

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#125

Post by gumby »

zasdffaa wrote: post #110
gumby wrote: post #7

It's crazy and destructive that we are still using the unix paradigm in the cloud. In the 70s we have transparent network fileststems, and by the 80s I had a more advanced cloud-native environment at PARC than is available today.* The Lispms were not quite as cloud native as that, but still you could have the impression that you just sat down at a terminal and had immediate window into an underlying "cloud" reality,…

Abstractions usually (always?) have a cost because physics . > The damned thing even ran sendmail and? > Cloud computing really still it "somebody else's computer." That's the definition of 'the cloud'. Unless you run it locally in which case it's your computer. What's your point. > There's no "OS" (in the philosophical sense) for treating remote resources truly abstractly It's unclear what you're asking for. Treatin…

>> Cloud computing really still it "somebody else's computer."

> That's the definition of 'the cloud'. Unless you run it locally in which case it's your computer.

Forget the stupid framing of idiotic marketers in the early 00s and go back to the original “cloud” definition (that engineers were still using in those ‘00s but was distorted for a buck).

The term was introduced (by Vince Cerf perhaps) in the original Internet protocol papers, literally with a picture of a cloud with devices at the edge. It was one of the revolutionary paridigms of IP: you push a packet into the cloud (network) but don’t need to / can’t look into it and the network worries about how to route the picket — on a per-packet basis! You don’t say “the cloud is other peoples’ routers”.

Today’s approach to remote computing requires developers to know too much about the remote environment. It’s like the bad old days of having to know the route to connect to another host.

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#126

Post by gpderetta »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #102
huijzer wrote: post #66

Developing on a cloud VM is all fun and games until the connection drops. Will it some day be possible to have a reliable connection everywhere all the time? I donno.

Without internet connection, most modern development grinds to a halt pretty quickly in any case. Github won't work. All those dependencies your build needs will no longer download. That issue tracker that tells you what you need to do is no longer reachable, and forget about copy pasting from Stackoverflow. Etc. There are things you can still do offline of course. But it gets inconvenient pretty quickly. There's not…

> There's not a whole lot of offline development happening anymore.

luckily that's not the case everywhere.

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#127

Post by gumby »

gwm83 wrote: post #64
gumby wrote: post #7

It's crazy and destructive that we are still using the unix paradigm in the cloud. In the 70s we have transparent network fileststems, and by the 80s I had a more advanced cloud-native environment at PARC than is available today.* The Lispms were not quite as cloud native as that, but still you could have the impression that you just sat down at a terminal and had immediate window into an underlying "cloud" reality,…

Excuse me sir, are you going to pay for those?

You don’t pay per packet even though a huge amount of computation is done on devices between you and the machine you’re connecting to in order to transmit each one.

See my comment about tollbooths above.

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#128

Post by fauigerzigerk »

jcims wrote: post #124

The HN conversation yesterday about the complexity of the proton, in particular how we poke and prod at it to suss out its qualities and quantities, got me thinking about the subatomic particles of my personal subjective conscious experience. We can trace, with quite a bit of precision, how a certain photon cocktail results in me perceiving the orange title bar at the top of HN. But where's the orange paint in my bra…

For a moment I thought there must be some faulty entanglement in my own brain, but now I think you actually meant to post your comment under a completely different story that's currently on the front page :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33272536

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#129

Post by fleddr »

I started my career in simpler times. Developers would produce a zip and handed it over to an admin guy. Dev and Infra/Ops clearly separated. No CI, sometimes not even a build step.

I understand the power and flexibility of the cloud but the critical issue is the dependency on super humans. Consider a FE or mobile app developer. They already greatly struggle just to keep up with development in their field. Next, you add this massive toolset on top of it, ever-changing and non-standardized.

A required skillset overload, if you will. Spotify concluded the same internally. They have an army of developers and realized that you can't expect every single one of them to be such "superhuman". They internally built an abstraction on top of these services/tools, to make them more accessible and easy to use.

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#130

Post by [deleted] »

cube00 wrote: post #116
fragmede wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of weird that it's not just a built in toggle button to the system but GCP has the primitives to let you suspend the system when a threshold is met. https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa...

Shame it doesn't actually protect you, this startup [1] had a spending limit and they racked up charges so fast even Google's own billing system couldn't keep up. In typical Google fashion it's luck of the draw if you get saved or lose your home [2] [1] https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25378899

[deleted]
Post reply on HN