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Operating Systems Still Matter In a Containerized World

Posted by Soulskill on from the try-to-contain-yourself dept.

New submitter Jason Baker writes: With the rise of Docker containers as an alternative for deploying complex server-based applications, one might wonder, does the operating system even matter anymore? Certainly the question gets asked periodically. Gordon Haff makes the argument on Opensource.com that the operating system is still very much alive and kicking, and that a hardened, tuned, reliable operating system is just as important to the success of applications as it was in the pre-container data center.

4 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Of Course They Do! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Stripped to the bone, an operating system is a set of APIs that abstract the real or virtual hardware to make applications buildable by mere mortals. Some work better than others under various circumstances, so the OS matters no matter where it's running.

    1. Re:Of Course They Do! by DivineKnight · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I can't wait for programmers, sometime in 2020, to rediscover the performance boost they receive running an OS on 'bare metal'...

  2. Re:Advert? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Is this just an advert for Docker?

    Yes. They refer to the "rise" of Docker, yet I had never heard of it before. Furthermore, Docker doesn't even fit with the main point of TFA that "the OS doesn't matter". Here is a complete, exhaustive list of all the OSes that Docker can run on:

    1. Linux

  3. what are you smoking? by Chirs · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Anything performance-sensitive isn't going to use emulation but rather paravirtualization or passthrough of physical devices. Current x86 virtualization is getting pretty good, with minimal hit to CPU-intensive code. As for I/O, you can pass through PCI devices in to the guest for pretty-much native networking performance.

    Disk I/O still isn't as good as native, but it's good enough, and most enterprise systems are using ISCSI anyway to allow for efficient live migration.