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Comment by Traubenfuchs | Hacker News Reader

So you were pretty much working on a more hardware based predecessor of kubernetes?

Why did it not work out?

I think a few things combined to torpedo it. Firstly we were hit with the dotcom crash. Secondly Sun’s future rapidly looked less bright, and they were the main server partner in the gang. Thirdly there wasn’t (yet) the “Datacenter OS/Orchestration” layer. It didn’t exist and was the part that would allow us (I think worlds largest ISP and shared/dedicated hosting provider at the time) to carve up the data center on-demand. Remember this is ‘99 so there was no VMware server for another ~2 years. Finally, x86 rack servers got “good enough” and that low cost Pee-Cee architecture took over (with more than a little help from Linux). Yes it was hard to orchestrate. Yes it lead to sprawl (before even VM sprawl) but the market didn’t care.

It wasn’t written in Go </snark>

I’d also love to hear more about the concept.

Go peaked in 2017. Rust is the new hotness. 3 years from now, it will be something else.

Some big problems that jump out:

* Infiniband hardware didn't get cheaper as fast as RAM + disk

* Infiniband hardware didn't get faster as quickly as locally-attached RAM + disk

> Why did it not work out?

Software won, it seems.

kinda, It was cheaper to use fibrechannel/ethernet and plain old sparc/intel machines

This was about the time that grid engines promised mainframe computing without the cost. Only that it required people to understand how to parallelise their workloads. That and modify programmes to run in on many machines at once.

> Why did it not work out?

1) cost

2) software support

3) cost

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