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A Glimpse of a Truly Elastic Cloud
New submitter cloudozer writes "Virtual servers in the future may stop using OSes entirely. As recently demonstrated OS-less platforms may change our understanding of how long does it take to bring a server up. A demo server gets created, booted up, configured, runs an application and shuts down in under 1 second. Radically lower startup latency means that the computing infrastructure may be woven strictly on demand, during the processing window allotted for a given request. Currently cloud providers round an instance uptime to the full hour when calculating charges. They might need to switch to per-second billing if OS-less instances get traction. The demo uses a new Erlang runtime system capable of running directly on Xen hypervisor."
Reminds me of a certain OS from the distant past. It had file system support, a process launcher (one process at a time), and... more or less, that was it.
No kidding. Are we going to allow application programmers to start making direct calls to the hardware? If so, then kill me now. Use a spoon if you have to, it will be more merciful.
So, the os then.
Since a cloud is made of millions of tiny water particles (the virtual servers), and this condenses them all to a single body of water, I suggest we call this revolutionary new approach "pond" computing.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
No, no, no! It can't be an OS without a graphical user interface, web browser, email client, calendar, media player, typesetting system, at least three text editors, five or more programming languages, drivers for every peripheral known to man and a collection of games. Heck Apple's so-called "OS X" barely qualifies, lacking an integrated implementation of "Minesweeper".
Even with 'modular' operating systems, if enabling file sharing doesn't install Ghostscript and X11 then something is very wrong.
An OS without all these is like a text editor without Lisp and Eliza.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.