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Run containers on bare metal already [video] (youtube.com)
131 points by tdurden on Nov 15, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 35 comments



Amusing Interview with Bryan Cantrill (regarding his background and he also shares some stories) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6XQUciI-Sc#t=06m06s

Also very informative (about what happened at Sun in the 90s, dtrace, ...)

Quite a funny and smart guy ;)


This talk of Cantril's was in the same vein, and also really amusing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc The "don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison" bit was fantastic and made all the better by the fact that Oracle was a USENIX sponsor. That's also why this single talk had the disclaimer sidebar.


The section of interest here about "Don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison" starts around 33 minutes in.


Oh, yeah, sorry, should have given a timestamp.


Millions of Linux-based OpenVZ containers, across hundreds of hosting companies, have been deployed over the last 10 years. It's the only container technology that gained widespread adoption across the industry.

Docker owes a lot of its success to the work the OpenVZ developers (and others) did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVZ


Having worked with both technologies... ( and a few others including Freebsd jails, xen vms and zones on Solaris)

Docker is a distinct improvement on a couple of levels.

Quicker to launch if your imageset is local. More tractable command set. Relatively bandwidth efficient.


Cantrill is one of my favorite tech speakers. Brilliant guy, and much more down to earth than a lot of others on the circuit, not to mention great energy.


Read my mind !



Ya, running a public cloud and competing against Amazon, I can see why he has so much angst about VMs. The reality is, the market wants what Amazon is selling and no amount of blasting VMs is going to undo that.

https://www.joyent.com/public-cloud/aws-comparison

The funny thing is he almost gets it right at the beginning of the talk about how Docker focused on the developer. That's what made Amazon successful.

Who is using Joyent?

https://www.joyent.com/about/customers


> Who is using Joyent?

Folks for whom a business relationship with Amazon is not possible because of competitive reasons, for one. Regulatory compliance is another.

There're also some big names using Joyent (one of whom is a Fortune 1 company last I heard…) whose policies endorsing third parties are too restrictive to allow their trademarks to be used there.


Would that be walmart? i just googled 'fortune 1' and that was the first result


I actually can't confirm that! What I said in my comment previous ("Fortune 1 company") is exactly what I heard over the course of one of Bryan Cantrill's other talks.

That said, though, I'm sure that'd be the intended inference.


My understanding is that the bulk of Walmart's compute is run on a private openstack setup, after migrating it off of Rackspace.

https://gigaom.com/2015/02/17/openstack-comes-up-huge-for-wa...


My understanding is that a portion is on OpenStack, a portion is on legacy bare-metal, and a portion is in the Public Cloud (Rackspace and presumably some Joyent per this thread). Source: I work with a bunch of ex-WM employees and have interviewed a bunch more over the past six months.


> the market wants what Amazon is selling

You say that as if it's an immutable fact, as permanent as the laws of nature. Market demand changes all the time.

> no amount of blasting VMs is going to undo that.

I wouldn't be so certain, especially if you have strong performance and ergonomic arguments to back you up. Even more so if you actually have a better alternative to offer.


Strong opinion, weakly held. If you have any evidence to counter AWS cloud dominance please do share. Sources: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/05/28/gartn..., http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/194876/5-things-we-learned-a...


AWS is clearly dominant right now, as your links show. What I'm disagreeing with is the idea that it will be dominant in the future.

On the other hand, who's to say they won't start offering containers on bare-metal and keep their lead?


Nearly everyone who was ever disrupted had the exact the same attiude that you emit here. Blockbuster video probably thought "the market wants what we are renting! physical media ftw baby" fast forward and they are dead.

I'm being dramatic here and I obviously don't think amazon will die. But lets re-visit this post in 5 years and I bet AWS is selling a lot more bare metal. Because thats what the market will want.


I felt like i was watching a Silicon Valley standup.


did some moment in particular seem like a tv show to you?


Can someone give a TL/DR for this? I don't have 40 minutes to invest and the first few minutes didn't give me the impression it was going to be worthwhile.

But I would like to run containers on "Bare metal"... which for me right now means running containers under CoreOS (which is running on the bare metal... so no VMs.)


Solaris/Illumos/SmartOS (Joyent's O/S, Joyent being Cantrill's company that offers a public cloud like AWS), has built-in lightweight containers that have all the right isolation characteristics (esp. security)

Docker/CoreOS build upon Linux primitives for isolated name spaces, but security is a problem because of Linux's flawed implementation. But Docker is the flavor of the month, even though it is technically inferior to SmartOS's.

So they (Joyent, Cantrill's company) wrapped SmartOS with the docker remote API, so when you do 'docker ps', you see all the VMs in the entire data center. The whole cloud works as one machine.


Joyent chose BSD which does containers better than Linux and Cantrill is pissed that everyone chose Linux+VMs.


> Joyent chose BSD which does containers better than Linux and Cantrill is pissed that everyone chose Linux+VMs

(Disclaimer: I sit next to Bryan at Joyent)

We chose _SmartOS_, a distribution of illumos -- itself a fork of the last drop of OpenSolaris before Oracle closed the gate. It is emphatically not a BSD, though Solaris has included aspects of at least AT&T UNIX and BSD (amongst other things) in its long and rich heritage.


I'm starting to totally love SmartOS. Kudos to you and colleagues.


Thanks for the correction. I should have gotten that right. I don't think the talk mentioned Illumos at all.

EDIT: he did mention Illumos but he was talking really fast.


Here is a TL/DR; in one word: Triton


So, are people doing something like running one container per vm?

I have yet to do more that run Docker's whalesay container, but I figured the obvious thing to do is to either use an entire blade with one OS on it, or provision a single, large, vm and run many containers.

If anyone feels like sharing, how do you deal with persistent data? Like mysql databases, uploaded files, logs, etc. I'll eventually be googling it, but figured it couldn't hurt to get pointed somewhere by people who have experience. :)


Is it realistic for the mass of Linux admins to switch over to SmartOS? Is fixing Linux containers realistic?

This is a serious question. It's a great talk, but how can we apply it apart from becoming a Joyent customer?


Having watched this talk, I must ask: With the allegory to the Vietnam War by way of Dien Bien Phu, what would be considered the toppling of Saigon by the Viet Cong?


Is this guy high when delivering this talk?


Yes, high on the enjoyment of giving a well prepared talk to a large crowd mixed with the nervousness of putting practice into production.

Seriously, this is a fantastic talk.


It was a great talk and his high-energy delivery I think is a well welcomed change of pace compared to many tech conference speakers


Does this guy actually think he's funny? He really fails at humor straight out of the gate. It's hard to even focus on what he's trying to convey because his "humor" is so cringe worthy.




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