Given that VMS futures, POSIX support, RMS features and programming, server and application scaling, and VM sprawl have all been discussed recently, this is really something else to ponder.
Why the data center needs an operating system
91–100 of 102 posts
Re: Why the data center needs an operating system
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't be betting my marbles on Hadoop, or anything Map Reduce now adays. Spark beats it pretty handily for data processing although HBase isn't too bad.
With YARN, Hadoop has built a more generic scheduler comparable to Mesos. https://www.quora.com/How-does-YARN-compare-to-Mesos
YARN is still in its infancy and doesn't run in production for user-facing applications at any large site. Also, there are big limitations when it comes to scaling YARN. YARN also has a lot of overhead on each machine the worker processes run on.
Twitter runs mesos in a multi 10k node cluster for user facing, production applications.
Re: Why the data center needs an operating system
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know which kinds of enterprise orgs you're envisioning but when I think about "traditional" enterprise IT orgs, I'm picturing companies in healthcare, insurance, certain finance business units, non-profits, public sector, and defense, not any place ever mentioned a lot here on HN in a technical discussion. I've worked with a LOT of them and I'd be surprised if the ratio of ops engineers to servers was anythin…
I think part of the difference is due to the fact that the business of administering healthcare, insurance, financials and other businesses are infinitely more complex than say, serving up search results or 140 character micro blog posts. It seems much easier in my opinion to scale a single function (search or tweet) than the kinds of tasks that a healthcare company has to do like say...scanning faxes from doctors, a…
The idea is that those services get commoditized, so the healthcare company gets them off the shelf rather than hires engineers to build them.
Re: Why the data center needs an operating system
#94It's interesting and great to see this stuff take center stage more and more. Those lucky enough to work at places like Twitter, Google, Facebook and other large tech companies will have already seen how this kind of thing dominates the datacenter's there and has been at the core of their systems for many years. People on the outside though are rarely exposed to this concept of datacenter scale computing aside from t…
I agree with you but I don't think we'll have to wait 10 years to see that happening. We're still a fairly small startup but we're transitioning our whole platform to be built around Mesos (and we're definitely not the only ones in that case). I don't know why many people think that they need to be at datacenter scale computing to benefit from abstractions like Mesos, it's completely wrong imo. It's quite a big shift…
>>> I don't know why many people think that they need to be at datacenter scale computing to benefit from abstractions like Mesos, it's completely wrong imo
My next startup will be built on Mesosphere. Faster time to MVP and no "go dark for 18 months" when I have to scale.
Re: Why the data center needs an operating system
#95It's interesting and great to see this stuff take center stage more and more. Those lucky enough to work at places like Twitter, Google, Facebook and other large tech companies will have already seen how this kind of thing dominates the datacenter's there and has been at the core of their systems for many years. People on the outside though are rarely exposed to this concept of datacenter scale computing aside from t…
> Google SREs by last count were 1 engineer to 1000 machines That number does not seem particularly impressive, if it is accurate. Even "traditional" well-run enterprise IT organizations are often in the 1 admin/SRE to 600-ish machines, so I have a hard time seeing that Google can only do ~2x as good at their scale and with their level of focus. 1 SRE to 5k machines, 10k machines, that makes more sense to me.
the 1 admin to 600 machines quoted as the high end for traditional IT datacenter is, in my experience, a murky number. It's usually a ratio of people/virtual machines, not physical machines.
When you remove the VM smokescreen and count physical boxes it's more like 1 person/100 machines, which is abysmal. I've seen order-of-magnitude people efficiency increases with automation like we're discussing here.
Re: Why the data center needs an operating system
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google SREs by last count were 1 engineer to 1000 machines That number does not seem particularly impressive, if it is accurate. Even "traditional" well-run enterprise IT organizations are often in the 1 admin/SRE to 600-ish machines, so I have a hard time seeing that Google can only do ~2x as good at their scale and with their level of focus. 1 SRE to 5k machines, 10k machines, that makes more sense to me.
It doesn't matter how high scale google gets, hard drives still fail at the same rate.
Rip and replace of a hard drive is not hard when you have a datacenter that is completely self-healing. An intern on roller skates can do it.
Re: Why the data center needs an operating system
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Secondly, who cares about "wasted" resources of a whole underutilised server when reliable dedicated servers are so cheap, and in such plentiful supply? The people bankrolling Google / Facebook / Twitter's electricity bills seem to care quite a bit. There is another trope that gets repeated often, (and this is not even remotely directed at you, just a digression hopefully somewhat on topic) "performant languages ru…
At Google scale it matters, sure. But most companies aren't Google scale. Writing your single-company 100-user CRUD webapp in Java or C++ "for performance" is the ultimate false economy. /I used to work for a company that had a big Java app. We laughed at our client who needed 60 Rails servers to deliver worse performance than our single-instance app. But they probably saved more on dev costs than they spent on serve…
A mid-market SaaS company might have a $1mm/mo Amazon bill. I think cutting in that half would be meaningful to just about anybody.
Re: Why the data center needs an operating system
#98This stuff is very confuse, and it confuses all the HN commenters even more. There is no such thing as a datacenter OS. Simplification: An OS is a kernel and it's associated base software. The kernel drives the hardware. You need to talk to disks. Memory. what not. Kernel is needed. You need to talk to the kernel and tie these components together. You write software. Boom, you have an OS. A datacenter isnt a disk and…
Is a 40,000 core disaggregated rack really that different from a 4 core laptop? Google pioneered this way of thinking [1]. tl;dr the datacenter is a computer and that computer will inevitably have an OS.
[1] http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rxin/db-papers/WarehouseScaleCom...
Re: Why the data center needs an operating system
#99One way to think about this problem is to look at components that people thought were useful in an operating system and then think about what a distributed version might look like. E.g. for an OS we have: filesystem scheduler cron Then you can go look at the history of these primitives so the same lessons don't have to be relearned. For example, the Linux kernel has gone through many iterations of its scheduler with…
That is exactly right.
Re: Why the data center needs an operating system
#100I feel like this is on the right track, but sadly fails to address the underlying problem. Until the network is virtualized everything else will suffer. If the cloud is to become the default platform for services (I think it will), then the user must be able to define their own virtual data center. This includes their own virtual nets. What the author writes about will be built upon these virtual nets, but until the…
The DCOS supports network virtualization. Changes in underlying infrastructure can be manifested all the way up the stack to applications and their schedulers. E.g., the DCOS can rewrite network routing tables based on placement decisions.