Re: [TUHS] ATC/OSDI'21 joint keynote: It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware (Timothy Roscoe)

[Tony Finch <dot@dotat.at>]

Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>
> There have been many, many proposals in the distributed computing
> arena which all try to answer these questions differently.  Solaris
> had an answer with Yellow Pages, NFS, etc.  OSF/DCE had an answer
> involving Kerberos, DCE/RPC, DCE/DFS, etc.  More recently we have
> Docker's Swarm and Kubernetes, etc.  None have achieved dominance, and
> that should tell us something.

I think there are two different kinds of distributed computing there.

Distributed authentication and administration is dominated by Microsoft
Active Directory (LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, SMB, ...) which I think can
reasonably be regarded as part of Windows (even if many Windows machines
aren't part of an AD). That kind of distributed system doesn't try to help
you stop caring that there are lots of computers.

Whereas Kubernetes and Docker Swarm do automatic lifecycle management for
distributed workloads. I have not yet had the pleasure (?) of working with
them but I get the impression that it's difficult to set up their access
control to stop giving everything root on everything else. They try much
harder to make a cluster work as a single system.

Tony.
-- 
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