Strategic Thinking (was: Re: Speculative: Rust for base system components)

[Alan Somers]

On Sun, Jan 6, 2019 at 11:31 AM Wojciech Puchar <wojtek at puchar.net> wrote:
>
> > At $JOB my customers are migrating from AIX, Solaris and even Windows
> > to Linux and from traditional Linux to microservices run under
> why this "microservices" - which are simply complete programs without
> dependencies (or should be) - cannot be run simply as processes on
> different user accounts?

Several reasons:
1) Separate accounts don't provide as much security as separate
containers.  Capsicum does, but people aren't used to using Capsicum
yet.  And who can blame them?  Writing a Capsicum program is harder
than writing a normal program and deploying it in a container.
2) Fragmentation.  The Linux world is much more fragmented than the
FreeBSD world.  It's hard to write a program that will work correctly
on every Linux distro without modification.  So people bundle their
applications with entire userlands as a container image.  That reduces
its external dependencies to just the Linux kernel.  Bloated, yes.
But easy.
3) Fashion.  You may not care about the latest IT craze, but a lot of
IT departments do.  And you can't change their minds all by yourself.

If FreeBSD is to be used by people who deploy microservices, then it
needs to do what they want.  That means it needs Docker or something
similar (IT admins won't want to learn ezjail if they're already
comfortable with Docker), or we need to convince people to use
CloudABI.  CloudABI has the potential to outperform containers.  It
just hasn't gained traction yet.
-Alan