Here I am, warped through jet leg in the sunny Texas. Austin. The reason is to attend the Reactive summit 2
016. Two days crammed with interesting speeches by luminaries of the reactive community. I’ll try my best to provide a brief summary of each talk I will attend, reportin faithfully what the speaker said and adding my thoughts. If you know about reactive systems and you read something unreasonable it is likely I missed something in the process.
This talk is by Edward Hwu – mesosphere.
(I’ll leave out the quote about Justin Bibier being the reason for having reactive systems… in part because I missed something).
If you compare the number of Internet users today with the same number a few years ago you will notice that it has increased manyfolds. Almost everyone owns a smartphone and almost everyone use it to interact with Internet. Regardless companies that make business over Internet need to be sure to be able to comply with these large number of interactions in order not to lose customers and business opportunities.
Because of the increase in the number of Internet users an architecture shift was needed: distributed systems are the only way for industry to cope with this growth.
Modern applications that runs websites are made from open source software, VMs have been replaced by containers that have shorter startup time and are lighter to run.
Additionally containers provide the means for elasticity – they can be used just for the time needed for run the service – and allows for fast and frequent releases.
Data services provide connection and persistence.
Mesos is the core component of DC/OS whose purpose is to manage and abstract data center in the same way a traditional OS abstracts from hardware. Where the traditional OS operates on a single computer, DC/OS operates on the whole data center.
Operations such as installing Kafka or Spark on a cluster, with the proper configuration and replica count, is handled with a single click. You can find services ready to install and use on the open universe app store. As of today you can find 40+ apps
Here’s my thought. Well DC/OS seems to be the real shift in distributed systems. My impression is that the era of custom made software to handle the specific aspects of distributed system (such as load balancing, or provisioning) is going the way of the dodo since structured and standard solutions are being developed.
Having the facility to handle the whole datacenter with simple commands is possibly going to revolutionize datacenter in the same way docker revolutionized application deployment. The latter avoiding developer to keep track manually of all the dependencies and providing a sensible installer, the former avoiding manual install on multiple node with configuration twiddling.
Maybe this technology is a bit ahead – I’m saying this because I found no trace of the universe app store on the internet (maybe I didn’t search enough), but for sure is very promising and being open source, free for all, is something that for sure will provide widespread adoption.