Canonical Launches MicroCloud to Deploy Your Own "Fully Functional Cloud"

And IT does another cycle.

I work with an enterprisey on-prem product, which we of-course tried to replace with a cloud offer. And in all fairness, it's generally gone well - but because we manage the platform, it sits in the cloud we chose. And that's never going to be the right choice for everyone.

So we have some customers who are concerned about national boundaries. We have some customers who offer their own clouds, and aren't hugely enthusiastic about using the competition's. And then the whole mess with the govt having isolated regions within otherwise-public cloud offers.

Between these, it quickly became apparent that replacing our traditional offer with *aaS would leave a lot of money on the table. It's a minority of customers, but it turns out to be a very valuable minority.

Within that context at least, "private clouds" start to feel like they have legs - bringing most of the benefits of the cloud, to places that 'public' can't reach.

People keep saying that as if it was a bad thing

But they don't.

In fact, what they generally do is layer an implementation of the stuff they forgot last time on top of the preceding iteration which lacked it.

So now, we have clusters of Linux boxes, built with a ton of new tooling on top of Linux because Linux is a UNIX and traditional UNIX doesn't have networking or clustering in the design.

(Go on, then, 2 PCs on a LAN, both running a bare Linux kernel and a shell for init. Call them box1 and box2. Tell me how you mount the filesystem of box2 in a folder on box1.)

Plan 9 is UNIX 2.0 and can do this out of the box, but we didn't adopt Plan 9 so now we have to emulate it in a million lines of Rust or something.

Now we have WASM which is kinda sorta compiling to the bare bytecode of the Javascript runtime, for universal app binaries. Only you need a vast infrastructure to run it.

Inferno is UNIX 3.0 and can do this out of the box: it has the Dis VM right in the kernel, and all its components are compiled to Dis bytecode so binaries run on all supported processors.

But we didn't adopt Inferno so now we have to emulate it in a million lines of C++ because Mozilla cancelled Rust.