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A Glimpse of a Truly Elastic Cloud

Posted by timothy on from the nice-to-meet-you-goodbye dept.

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."

6 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. A runtime system is an OS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you don't need much from your OS, then trim the OS down. That doesn't mean you're not using an OS. Unless you run bare-metal code, you are using an OS.

    1. Re:A runtime system is an OS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

  2. "stop using OSes"? by 1u3hr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What gibberish is this? There is an OS, presumably Xen. Unless we're returning to the 1940s and wiring up tubes to make programs, there is an OS.

    1. Re:"stop using OSes"? by julesh · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You can argue about whether the Erlang runtime constitutes an OS of sorts

      AFAICS there's no argument at all. It is an OS; not a particularly good one, but one that provides scheduling, interprocess communication (albeit for what we'd traditionally consider to be threads rather than processes, but due to Erlang's memory/threading model there's actually no real distinction), memory management, and abstraction of IO (albeit somewhat simplified from the approach taken by a typical modern OS).

    2. Re:"stop using OSes"? by ls671 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Unless we're returning to the 1940s and wiring up tubes to make programs,

      I had a few games on bootable floppies back in the original PC days, around 1985. The floppies would boot up the computer right into the game so there was no OS involved. And no, BIOS is not some kind of bisexual OS, it stands for Basic Input/Output System.

      --
      Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
  3. Still an OS... by FaxeTheCat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So instead of booting a general purpose OS, the system uses one OS specifically for running other OSes (XEN) and one minimal special purpose OS for running the application (Erlang runtime). Whether you cal it a hypervisor or a runtime system, it is still an OS.

    Instead of focusing on the irrelevant and incorrect "not using an OS", why not focus on the more interesting fact that for some tasks, it may be worth the effort to create a custom build of the OS with only the functions needed. That version may even be automatically created (or chosen) as part of the application build.