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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

Nah, we'd still find ways to make it complex. I mean, yes, I think Plan 9 would've been a nicer base to work from and maybe reduced it a bit, but people are excellent at making things more complex, sometimes for legitimate reasons. Off the top of my head, I don't think Plan 9 has a good "orchestration" story itself (ex. "run 17 instances of this process wherever there's enough free resources in our 100-server cluster"), and while the "Plan 9 k8s" of this alternate universe would be simpler than the k8s we have in reality, it would still exist and add one or more layers of abstraction, and then people would stick management layers in front of that, and...

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> I don't think Plan 9 has a good "orchestration" story itself

I'm not super familiar with plan 9, but given what I do know, I'm pretty sure that could be done with an rc script. I'm pretty sure that a) you can fork processes after starting them on remote systems, and b) you can query remote systems to figure out which ones have free resources. Given that, it's just a shell / rc script away. Then you just need another script to do the management. ;)

As another example of something orchestration-like ("run 17 processes where possible on this 100 node cluster"), there were also OpenMOSIX and Beowulf clusters on Linux, which if I remember right would load balance work across available systems, in the same way that the kernel's scheduler balances work across CPU cores.

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

Yes. Mosix was the kind of black magic that makes you think software today is still several generations behind the times (like Plan9 before it). Even its distributed network filesystem is superior in ease of use to all others. But the devil's in the details, and distributing threads and shared memory is just really difficult, and the patchsets never made it into vanilla. So there goes yet another amazing design down the drain.

It reminds me of how electric cars are a 190 year old technology whose actual peak popularity was 120 years ago. Yet here we are, with manufacturers predicting they'll finally be popular again, in 10 to 15 years.

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