Re: [9fans] A note about new software for Plan 9

[Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com>]

On Tue, 12 Mar 2013 04:20:16 -0000 mycroftiv@sphericalharmony.com wrote:
>
> Do you think it would be helpful or welcome to re-post some of this
> material here on 9fans?

Your explanations are ok.  My guess is people don't have time
or sufficient motivation to dig deeper and read your papers.
Posting more stuff here won't help.

Motivation (for me at least) has to come from attempting to
solve "interesting" (i.e. practical, fun, &/or challenging)
problems.  Here are some examples (your ANTS may/may not be
relevant):

Jails solve specific problems (by isolating servers I reduce
exposure and can manage each service independently). In a
previous job we needed to simulate many independent virtual
hosts on each physical machine to test routing software.  We
used something similar to jail to simulate large IP networks.

Migrating a service to another machine without taking it down
so that a physical machines can be repaired/upgraded etc.

If you could bundle off a few services and move them onto a
new machine that can help with scaling during peak hours.

Controlled namespace sharing (Rangboom did this I think).
These have many uses -- screen sharing, something like google
drive or dropbox, collaborative work, etc.

Instantly bring up a brand new machine with nothing but pxe
(background installation! -- until a local FS is created and
needed files copied, you work off of a `staging' server
provided namespace).

Ability to have the same work environment and no loss of data
or context regardless of where I am in the world (and may be
not even on the same machine).

Ability to move a program closer to the data it operates on
(different pieces may be in different places).

Map N virtual machines on M physical machines -- you can do your
own virtual cluster!

Making clusters resilient against node failures.