We clone a running VM in 2 seconds (2022)

I'm starting to see a pattern here. This describes a technology that rapidly deploys "VM" instances in the cloud which support things like Lambda and single-process containers. At what point do we scale this all back to a more rudimentary OS that provides security and process management across multiple physical machines? Or is there already a Linux distro that does this?

I ask because watching cloud providers like AWS slowly reinvent mainframes just seems like the painful way around.

EDIT: leaving the answer, but I simply misinterpreted what they meant. This isn't the same thing

BSD has had jails for a long time, which let you achieve isolation on a system in this manner, or at least close to it.

They’re missing multi-machine orchestration: Run thousands of jails on these dozen machines. Don’t bother me with the details at runtime.

They are also missing an ergonomic tool like dockerfiles. The following file, plus a cli tool for “run N copies on my M machines” should be enough to run bsd in prod, and it is not:

“FROM openbsd:latest ; CMD pkg -i apache ; echo “apache=enabled >> /etc/rc.defaults ; COPY public_html /var/www/ ; CMD init”

I don’t think writing the tooling would be that difficult, but it was missing the last time I looked.

We've been cycling around that wheel for a while.

If there's any difference now versus the past, it is that I think right now pretty much every point on the wheel is available quite readily now. If you want a more "rudimentary OS" you don't need to wait for the next turning of the wheel, it's here now. Need full VMs? Still a practical technology. Containers enough? Actively in development and use. Mix & match? Around any sensible combination you can do it now. And so on.

> I ask because watching cloud providers like AWS slowly reinvent mainframes just seems like the painful way around.

When AWS was the hot new thing in town a server was coming in at 12/24 threads.

A modern AMD machine tops out at 700+ threads and 400gb QSFP interconnects. GO back to 2000 and the Dotcom boom and thats a whole mid sized company, in a 2u rack.

Finding single applications that can leverage all that horsepower is going to be a challenge... and thats before you layer in lift for redundancy.

Strip away all the bloat, all the fine examples of Conways law that organizations drag around (or inherit from other orgs) and compute is at a place where it's effectively free... With the real limits/costs being power and data (and these are driven by density).

I think I may have simply misinterpreted what you meant. You're right, its not Dockerfile-esque easy

We were working on this at CoreOS before Kubernetes came about – called fleet https://github.com/coreos/fleet. Distributed systemd units run across a cluster, typically running containers or golang binaries with a super minimal OS underneath. I always thought it was cool but it definitely had its challenges and Kubernetes is better in most ways, IMO.

There was a multi-machine single-Linux-kernel-instance distro many years ago called Kerrighed. The company behind it died unfortunately so it hasn't kept up with Linux kernel patch rebasing. It offered a "view of a unique SMP machine on top of a cluster of standard PCs".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerrighed https://sourceforge.net/projects/kerrighed/