Comment by kogir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kogir | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Sigh... Most of you didn't even read the article.

Not one of the "base it on Linux or BSD" comments gets it. This whole thing is MSR saying, "look, we got it wrong, and so did everyone else. It's not just about one computer anymore."

Sure, they're fixing up the way system resources are exposed and planning to make the whole OS more fault tolerant, but the key takeaway is that the whole OS is network aware. Apps can discover storage, processors, memory, and other resources on the local trusted network, and use them without caring at all that they might be on different machines.

Try getting a single apache or IIS instance to run on 50 servers in a cluster, without writing all of the distribution logic in the application. Sure you could separately configure a local instance on each node, and set up file syncronization or network storage, and...

Why federate your database when you could just add another node to the OS cluster, thereby increasing the resources available to the single DB instance?

The goal is to get all the infrastucture work for free.

I hope someone, anyone, can pull this off. As a developer of a distributed app, let me tell you, the bar right now is WAY too high, and current operating systems, be they Windows or Linux are not up to the task.

[Edit: slashes caused unintentional italics]

To be fair the article wasn't a light read.

It sounds to me like they're taking Erlang concepts to the next level and baking them into the fundamental architecture of the OS.

This is Hacker News. I expect every article to not be "a light read."

I tend to expect the same from the comments.

Not only that, but Singularity allows fine-grained security along the lines of capabilities. (Arguably Erlang has something like capabilities baked in as well.) This is the way security should have been done for internet-connected end-user controlled computers. What we have now is security meant to be managed by super-knowledgeable super-users.

What security does Erlang have? Does it have more than a single security mechanism: a shared secret (cookie) for allowing communication between nodes?

Nope, that's it. Erlang is designed for cluster environments, and the cookie method is lightweight and good enough for that sort of environment.

If you want better security, unfortunately you have to roll it yourself. You could write a message router that tunnels Erlang messages over TCP, and apply some sort of authentication process to that.

Erlang applications that are exposed to the Internet do not allow Erlang connections from the outside, but rather implement a custom socket protocol and only use Erlang distribution internally.

I hear that they're planning on adding better security in future versions, but I don't know any details about that.

Try getting a single apache or IIS instance to run on 50 servers in a cluster

WHY???? the whole point of the web server is to be a stateless middleware broker. do these fifty servers now have one virtual port 80? do all fifty need to be restarted on a config change? the premise of one web server running on a cluster makes no sense

i can saturate an outbound gb ethernet connection with apache on one box. what are the other 49 supposed to be doing????

It was an example. And to your point, I was assuming you'd be serving an app using ASP.Net or PHP or something, not serving static files.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com