Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years

[Skip Tavakkolian <9nut@9netics.com>]

ericvh stated it better in the "FAWN" thread.  choosing the abstraction
that makes the resulting environments have required attributes
(reliable, consistent, easy, etc.) will be the trick.  i believe with
the current state of the Internet -- e.g.  lack of speed and security
-- service abstraction is the right level of distributedness.
presenting the services as file hierarchy makes sense; 9p is efficient
and so the plan9 approach still feels like the right path to cloud
computing.

> On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 12:12 AM, Skip Tavakkolian <9nut@9netics.com> wrote:
>
>> > Well, in the octopus you have a fixed part, the pc, but all other
>> > machines come and go. The feeling is very much that your stuff is in
>> > the cloud.
>>
>> i was going to mention this.  to me the current view of cloud
>> computing as evidence by papers like this[1] are basically hardware
>> infrastructure capable of running vm pools each of which would do
>> exactly what a dedicated server would do.  the main benefits being low
>> administration cost and elasticity.  networking, authentication and
>> authorization remain as they are now.  they are still not addressing
>> what octopus and rangboom are trying to address: how to seamlessly and
>> automatically make resources accessible.  if you read what ken said it
>> appears to be this view of cloud computing; he said "some framework to
>> allow many loosely-coupled Plan9 systems to emulate a single system
>> that would be larger and more reliable".  in all virtualization
>> systems i've seen the vm has to be smaller than the environment it
>> runs on.  if vmware or xen were ever to give you a vm that was larger
>> than any given real machine it ran on, they'd have to solve the same
>> problem.
>
>
> I'm not sure a single system image is any better in the long run than
> Distributed Shared Memory.  Both have issues of locality, where the
> abstraction that gives you the view of a single machine hurts your ability
> to account for the lack of locality.
>
> In other words, I think applications should show a single system image but
> maybe not programming models.  I'm not 100% sure what I mean by that
> actually, but it's sort of an intuitive feeling.
>
>
>>
>>
>> [1] http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-28.pdf
>>
>>
>>