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Comment by mister_hn | Hacker News Reader

But the real question is: who are they? I've never heard about them, I don't understand all this hype here

Bryan is an O.G. systems engineer who worked at Sun and who's given many great talks and worked on lots of cool projects, and Jessie rose to prominence as a core docker developer and prolific and talented blogger/speaker, among other things. Both are well-known engineers with major contributions to open and closed source systems infrastructure. Steve Tuck I don't know yet, unfortunately.

Here are some more links if you're interested: https://blog.jessfraz.com/ https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bryan+cantrill

* Edit: Rephrased from "O.G. Sun Engineer", I don't know how accurate "O.G. systems engineer is", it's all relative anyway. For reference, I I'd consider Jess an "O.G. containerization engineer" :)

> Bryan was one of the O.G. Sun engineers

From Bryan's linked blog post - he joined Sun in the mid-90's. Sun was founded in 1982, so he was an (excellent) engineer there, but not one the "O.G.s"

Ah whoops! I meant "O.G. systems engineer" in general, independent of his time at Sun, not O.G. in terms of Sun's history! I don't know much about his history other than what I've gleaned from watching a few of his talks.

> Bryan was one of the O.G. Sun engineers

He's not that old!

(Hehe thanks, fixed.)

Jessie was employed by Docker, Bryan was CTO of Joyent and Steve was COO of Joyent. They all did some important contribution to the container ecosystem and they are now starting what appears to be a company selling custom cloud hardware.

> custom cloud hardware

Uhh, you mean computers?

Looking at their pedigree, I'd hazard that the computers are geared towards running containerized workloads, so "custom cloud hardware" sounds about right.

That seems to be the common theory, but what does that even mean? There's nothing all that special about running containers at the hardware level, they are really just groups of processes that the kernel manages a certain way.

That's not completely accurate. Hardware & OSes have not been designed for heavy multi-tenancy, leading to (among other issues) cache interference. At Netflix [1], we have to do quite a bit of work to undo that. Bigger orgs like Google have spent more than a decade improving the Linux scheduler in their own fork for similar reasons.

[1] https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/predictive-cpu-isolation...

Very interesting link, thanks. Obviously your use case goes way beyond running a standard Docker installation. It sounds like you really want the kernel to schedule containers instead of processes -- which it doesn't really do by default, hence my comment. Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising, that you're able to get these clear performance gains from a highly optimized special-purpose scheduler. Still, I was a bit surprised. :)

However, that's at the OS level. What can realistically be done at the hardware level? It must be possible in theory to design a CPU that's better at this kind of context switching, but I don't know if a new "computer company" really wants to go there.

While that's true, this particular company doesn't seem to be targeting anything that would improve containers (OS optimizations, new CPU). So I think the OP was correct in that simply changing the BMC or making it more secure on boot won't affect containers.

I'd be surprised if they didn't leverage something like the SmartOS container capabilities https://www.joyent.com/smartos

People who worked at Docker, Joyent, and Sun would be the ones to answer your question :). Consider the possibility that the kernel and the h/w are increasingly at odds on commodity server hardware.

My watch is a computer, so I don't think they want to make general purpose computers.

>selling

Not for a long while.

Bryan Cantrill was involved in Sun Microsystems before they got bought out by Oracle IIRC.

The other folks though, I have no idea.

Ever hear of dtrace?

No.

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