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Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on Xen

zerg.erlangonxen.org

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Re: Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on Xen

#2

Post by jacques_chester »

Nifty.

I postulated a while back that the virtual machine would eventually be the target of web application design[1]. I wrote an honours project proposal for a blog engine based on reckoning that if you can control a (virtual) machine from the bottom up, why stay trapped in the architectural constraints of shared hosting?

At the time I referred to the Mirage project, which was an OCaml runtime ported to sit directly on Xen [2]; later HalVM came along and did the same for Haskell [3].

This one is particularly neat because they've built more packaging and framework around it to support fast creation and destruction of instances.

I think this is an exciting time. The sooner people stop targeting shared servers as their architectural baseline, the sooner we can start to see genuine architectural innovation again. Right now all the architectural innovation is hidden in one-shot apps and inside companies. It needs to trickle down.

[1] http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/07/10/shared-hosting-is-doomed...

[2] http://openmirage.org/

[3] http://corp.galois.com/halvm

Re: Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on Xen

#3

Post by arb99 »

" 0.6 sec

ago is when we received your request. Within this time we managed to create a new Xen instance, boot it, and run the application that rendered the page you are viewing. By the time you are done reading this, the instance will be gone. "

for a basic page like that is a bit slow...

Re: Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on Xen

#6

Post by peteretep »

arb99 wrote: post #3

" 0.6 sec ago is when we received your request. Within this time we managed to create a new Xen instance, boot it, and run the application that rendered the page you are viewing. By the time you are done reading this, the instance will be gone. " for a basic page like that is a bit slow...

Presumably the idea is that you run a pool of them, so you're not spawning a new instance each time?

Re: Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on Xen

#9

Post by astrodust »

akent wrote: post #4

"Over capacity" "The demo is limited to 16 concurrent instances and 2 libvirt connections. Due to these limitations we were unable to spawn a new instance to service your request. Please try again later." Um.

Irony knows no bounds, except when misconfigured.
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