Unix in the CloudIgnorance, Stagnation,

Obsolescence

Synopsis▪ cloud in the broad sense of ideology

▪ not quite about running BSD on EC2

▪ very limited to skills and experience of yourshumbly

Multi-core▪ installation?

▪ configuration management?

▪ load balancing?

Multi-node▪ installation?

▪ configuration management?

▪ load balancing?

▪ why multi-node?

Large ComputingNeeds

▪ Facebook, Google, ...

▪ more than any OS can provide

Happy Hardware Vendor LawThe amount of nodes needed to solve a given task doubles every now and again.

OS Scalability Limit▪ 1 node only

▪ multi-socket and stacks approaching NUMA

▪ E25K, z10, etc — fail for most purposes

Operating System — ?▪ traditional definition no more relevant

▪ the notion itself on the brink of obsolescence

▪ field heavily eroded by current distributed apps

DistributedApplications

▪ forced to be an OS unto themselves

▪ huge overlap

▪ huge opportunity for sharing and consolidation

Anti-Patterns▪ virtualization

▪ chefs and puppets

▪ thick abstraction

Attempts▪ z/OS

▪ Plan 9, Inferno

▪ Clustrx, E1, DYSEAC, ...

▪ OpenStack (~~)

Species Survival PlanFreeze the bodies and leave them for future generations to fix.

Don't Panic:Incremental

▪ perfection v. done

▪ still a decade or more till a good AI

▪ no practical need for POSIX over a cloud

Mindful Approach▪ immediate practicality

▪ long-term perspective

▪ sustained, integrally rich effect

Operating System▪ major abstraction repository

▪ overlapping code distillery

▪ pre-production architecture research

Increments

Machine GeneratedData

▪ logs, error messages, status monitors

▪ meant for humans... no more

▪ rethinking for better aggregation and analysis

Identity andAuthentication

▪ YP, LDAP outdated and poorly supported

▪ no distributed model

▪ passwd in git as a first stab

Remote Procedure Call▪ ssh losing relevance, HPN or not

▪ all-mighty agent daemon worse than rsh

▪ capabilities, RBAC, WoT

Hardware Failures▪ no culture for low-level fault-tolerance

▪ watchdogd as state-of-the-art self-healing

▪ focus on self-diagnostics: disk error counters, etc

DistributedConfiguration

▪ current anti-patterns worsen the problem

▪ role-aware configuration

▪ / in git as a second stab

Storage▪ intra-node redundancy irrelevant

▪ no appropriate local multi-disk FS

▪ no fast path for data exchange

▪ nginx + curl + dispatcher

Error Handling▪ cf MGD and hardware failures

▪ software is 10x more prone to failures

▪ serious problem at scale

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