<story><title>Your computer is a distributed system</title><url>http://catern.com/compdist.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wwalexander</author><text>Plan 9 was designed in this way, but never took off.&lt;p&gt;Rob Pike:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; This is 2012 and we&amp;#x27;re still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon.</text></item><item><author>throwaway787544</author><text>The thing we are missing still is the distributed OS. Kubernetes only exists because of the missing abstractions in Linux to be able to do computation, discovery, message passing&amp;#x2F;IO, instrumentation over multiple nodes. If you could do &lt;i&gt;ps -A&lt;/i&gt; and see all processes on all nodes, or run a program and have it automatically execute on a random node, or if (&lt;i&gt;grumble grumble&lt;/i&gt;) Systemd unit files would schedule a minimum of X processes on N nodes, most of the K8s ecosystem would become redundant. A lot of other components like unified AuthZ for linux already exist, as well as networking (WireGuard anyone?).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jasonwatkinspdx</author><text>I think Rob is right to call out the problem, but is being a bit rose colored about Plan 9.&lt;p&gt;Plan 9 was definitely ahead of its time, but it&amp;#x27;s also a far cry from the sort of distributed OS we need today. &amp;quot;Everything is a remote posix file&amp;quot; ends up being a really bad abstraction for distributed computing. What people are doing today with warehouse scale clusters indeed has a ton of layers of crap in there, and I think it&amp;#x27;s obvious to yern for sweeping that away. But there&amp;#x27;s no chance you could do that with P9 as it was designed.</text></comment>
<story><title>Your computer is a distributed system</title><url>http://catern.com/compdist.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wwalexander</author><text>Plan 9 was designed in this way, but never took off.&lt;p&gt;Rob Pike:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; This is 2012 and we&amp;#x27;re still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon.</text></item><item><author>throwaway787544</author><text>The thing we are missing still is the distributed OS. Kubernetes only exists because of the missing abstractions in Linux to be able to do computation, discovery, message passing&amp;#x2F;IO, instrumentation over multiple nodes. If you could do &lt;i&gt;ps -A&lt;/i&gt; and see all processes on all nodes, or run a program and have it automatically execute on a random node, or if (&lt;i&gt;grumble grumble&lt;/i&gt;) Systemd unit files would schedule a minimum of X processes on N nodes, most of the K8s ecosystem would become redundant. A lot of other components like unified AuthZ for linux already exist, as well as networking (WireGuard anyone?).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gnufx</author><text>If you yearn for Plan 9 -- I&amp;#x27;m not sure I do -- Minnich&amp;#x27;s current incarnation of the inspiration seems to be &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;u-root&amp;#x2F;cpu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;u-root&amp;#x2F;cpu&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>