Google systems guru explains why containers are the future of computing
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Distribution: Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, Fedora, Ubuntu
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Google systems guru explains why containers are the future of computing
Quote:
As a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Eric Brewer devised the CAP theorem — a governing concept in the design of distributed systems — and co-founded web-search pioneer Inktomi. In this interview, Brewer, now vice president of infrastructure at Google, explains why the work he’s doing on application containers could be at least as big as cloud computing and how the CAP theorem is holding up nearly two decades after its inception.
Google is currently driving an open source project called Kubernetes that simplifies the process of building applications atop clusters of containers, including those using the popular Docker format.
From a developer perspective, what’s the advantage of deploying applications on these types of systems?
There are a lot of advantages. The role Kubernetes really plays is it has a little bit longer-term view of your application.
The initial value of containers is really that you can run it on your laptop and then you deploy the same thing in the cloud. That is great thing and Docker did a particularly great job on that, but what do you do then? Kubernetes answers that question, which is you run a fleet of containers where you have a controlled way to upgrade them, you have a controlled way to send to send them traffic, you can scale a service in terms of the number of containers that are included in running it, so that you can increase capacity as your load goes up.
These kind of operational things are really, I think, the important contribution of Kubernetes.
It sounds like you see this more as a development revolution than as an infrastructure revolution.
They go hand in hand, but my main goal is actually, above all, to get developers thinking about their applications as a collection of services where they don’t really think about the resources quite so directly. They certainly don’t manage them directly and deal with installs and patches and things like that.
*begin 1980's flashback*
When I first heard about operating systems, it was in the context of mainframe computing. Mainfames, my teachers told me, were so large they needed not just a programming language but also, something they left deliberately vague called an operating system. At about the same time I descovered that the worlds biggest mainframes had an even greater level of sophistication called a resource manage. This software wonder made the umanageably huge mainframe look to its running programmes like several smaller computers, of a sort that its users could use pritty much unaided.
*end 1980's flashback*
This flashback made me think that containers are a good idea. It will also amaze your readers that they are not a new idea, either.
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