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Comment by klysm | Hacker News Reader

If anybody is gonna do it, it's gonna be someone like amazon that vertically integrates through most of the hardware

That’s my point: TCP in the datacenter remains a 1% problem, in the sense that only 1% of customers actually have this as a problem, and only 1% of those have the ability to invest in a solution. At that point, market conditions incentivize protecting their work and selling it to others (e.g., Public Cloud Service Providers) as opposed to releasing it into the wild as its own product line for general purchase (e.g., Cisco). It’s also why their solutions aren’t likely to ever see widespread adoption, as they built their solution for their infrastructure and their needs, not a mass market.

Nevertheless Infiband exists.

Which makes the prospects of a replacement for either or both even more unlikely.

As does Fibre Channel and a myriad of other solutions out there. The point wasn’t to bring every “but X exists” or “but Company A said in this blog post they solved it” response out of the fog, but to point out that these issues are incredibly fringe to begin with yet make the rounds a few times a year every time someone has an “epiphany” about the inefficiencies of TCP/IP in their edgiest of edge-case scenarios.

TCP isn’t the most efficient protocol, sure, but it survives and thrives because of its flexibility, cost, and broad adoption. For everything else, there’s undoubtedly something that already exists to solve your specific gripe about it.

Amazon's solutions to 1% problems are the next batch of cargo cult corporate solution speak that we're going to have to deal with. How can we have a web scale agile big data devops monorepo machine learning microservice oriented architecture if we're limited by TCP? I mean, it was developed in the 70s...

Ugh, the fact I have to explain that we don’t need any of that cult-speak for our enterprise VMs (because enterprise software hasn’t even moved to containers yet) makes me grimace. I loathe how marketers and salesfolk have turned technology from a thing that can be adapted to solve your problems, into a productized solution for problems you never knew you had until the magazine they advertise in told your CIO about it.

They already started researching that in 2014 and have integrated the resulting protocol in some products like EBS:

https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2024/08/continuous-rein...

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