The "all the code and configuration goes everywhere but which services are activated depends on identity" model is how many of us are building production systems. Most large scale distributed systems I've worked on the past decade are not reconstructable from source. Rather the disk images are handed down from generation to generation, with bits getting swapped out by hand occasionally. Development is the act of mutating a system and weeding out the versions that don't work. When you have thousands of servers scattered all over the globe, all chatting with each other, this behavior emerges naturally.
Now the main mistake most people make when looking at the future of computing is that language, operating systems, etc, matter less than the scale of hardware. Once you have massive scale on computational fabric, your concerns cease to be the same. Time sharing goes away when everyone has thousands of cores. Message passing becomes the norm, but relativity becomes the new reality. When computation is a built in property of nano-scale structure of things, we will see a near total breakdown of current programming techniques. But at the same time fewer and fewer people with have the perspective to make it do anything useful. Look at FPGAs and think of what you would do if every square inch of your home, clothes, and workplace were covered in them. Could you design software that would run on a truly massive scale? _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
