from Hacker News

Containers and Distributed Systems: Where They Came from and Where They’re Going

by florianleibert on 10/12/17, 5:46 AM with 41 comments

• by ChuckMcM on 10/12/17, 5:59 AM

  This was a lot of fun, one of the things that doesn't get much air time is that back in the early 2000's when "clusters" and "NUMA SMP machines" were competing with each other the big argument for large SMP iron was ACID compliant SQL databases like Oracle. Now that Google has implemented an ACID compliant SQL database across clusters it puts the final nail in the argument (for me at least) that "Some things only work on SMP machines"

• by chubot on 10/12/17, 4:58 PM

  Just to double-click on container technology, why do you think it took so long for this technology that was built into Solaris to become mainstream with Docker?

  I think VMWare deserves a mention here? And the terms OS Virtualization vs Hardware virtualization do as well (Ctrl-F doesn't find them.)

  For awhile hardware virtualization (VMWare) was more prevalent, but it's more complex and has more overhead than OS virtualization (containers). That is how people solved the problem of having powerful machines and small workloads (or workloads with a lot of variance).

  Although historically it might have been that hardware virtualization actually came first, in IBM mainframes. In the Unix world I guess OS virtualization came first.

• by cat199 on 10/12/17, 1:38 PM

  "You basically came up with Docker before Docker was around, or at least with things like Solaris zones and C groups."

  Except jails already existed on FreeBSD, and CP/CMS on mainfraimes in the 70s existed long before this...

• by naasking on 10/12/17, 7:02 PM

  Containerization long predates Solaris, even on commodity hardware. Capability operating systems dating back to the 60s and 70s support even more extreme isolation by default.

• by swizydo on 10/12/17, 10:51 AM

  yea indeed