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

phoronix.com

21–30 of 94 posts

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

#22
post #9

This was my take, FWIW. https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/16/canonical_microcloud/

This demo is very hard to follow indeed. They are just jumping around, demoing features, but not talking about how it all fits together.

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

#23
post #9

This was my take, FWIW. https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/16/canonical_microcloud/

Mmm. So is MicroCloud essentially a glue between LXD + Ceph?

It's not really clear what the problem MicroCloud is trying to solve, though. Considering that LXD already supports multi-node clustering, why does anyone want another cluster manager on top of LXD?

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

#24
post #2

So.. we’re back to self-hosting your own services? And IT does another cycle.

I have the strong impression that most people confound cloud to be public only. Private clouds are fine and deliver a lot of the flexibility at a big % discount of a public cloud. The big gain from clouds is the flexible infrastructure, especially in the microservices world we are now. In the past, one needed to procure, provision, etc a new server to run a service (times X per environment). With a cloud, regardless…

Currently watching a large enterprise migrate to cloud and hosted private cloud(I know) but all most teams are doing is a 1:1 mapping of VMs. I can see the cost going through the roof vs on prem. Give it another three years and and we'll be rolling back a significant % to on prem.

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

#25
post #19
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't be a bad thing if people learned from the previous iteration. 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…

As much as I love Plan 9 and Inferno, the reason why they never were a commercial success is because they deliberately broke backwards compatibility with UNIX. (Which was an excellent choice for Plan 9 as a research OS, but perhaps should've been reconsidered for a commercial offering.) They did however accomplish pushing the "UNIX 1.0" into at least 1.1: as awkward as Linux's /proc is, it's still objectively better…

> Linux's /proc is [...] still objectively better than sysctl

Is it though? AFAIK there is no way to get an atomic snapshot of the contents of /proc so any attempt to traverse the tree will be met with "No such file or directory" errors as processes end. You can reproduce this with a simple:

    doas find /proc -name pid -exec cat {} \;
Whereas sysctl returns a consistent snapshot of the data requested.

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

#27
At home I have a small server farm of cheap Ryzen PCs. Mostly continuous integration and testing for open source projects, but also some LLM.

If I have some idea, I just throw it into farm and see results a few days later. It is slower than renting in cloud, bit about 4x cheaper.

It also heats my house a bit in winter...

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

#29
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us never left... I can't justify paying that much money just to execute some code on another person's server.

And some will never leave cloud.

That is where you run the cost calculations and decide if it is worth it or not. At the very first it can make zero sense to run in cloud. Then slightly in it becomes very worth it. Then later on that cost overhang becomes so big you are better off building your own. Where those boundaries are depends on your business.

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

#30
post #19
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't be a bad thing if people learned from the previous iteration. 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…

As much as I love Plan 9 and Inferno, the reason why they never were a commercial success is because they deliberately broke backwards compatibility with UNIX. (Which was an excellent choice for Plan 9 as a research OS, but perhaps should've been reconsidered for a commercial offering.) They did however accomplish pushing the "UNIX 1.0" into at least 1.1: as awkward as Linux's /proc is, it's still objectively better…

Except that Android, WebOS and ChromeOS are closer to Inferno than UNIX, and quite successful.

IBM i and IBM z, have done quite alright for OSes with an in-kernel JIT.

It turns out when a company really has the budget, and the necessary management support, to push a technology no matter what, it happens.

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