A partial video is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XhGEWg5HQk

1. Unix in the Cloud
Ignorance, Stagnation,
Obsolescence

2. Synopsis
▪ cloud in the broad sense of ideology
▪ not quite about running BSD on EC2
▪ very limited to skills and experience of yours
humbly

3. Multi-core
▪ installation?
▪ configuration management?
▪ load balancing?

4. Multi-node
▪ installation?
▪ configuration management?
▪ load balancing?
▪ why multi-node?

5. Large Computing
Needs
▪ Facebook, Google, ...
▪ more than any OS can provide

6. Happy Hardware Vendor Law
The amount of nodes needed to solve a given task doubles every now and again.

7. OS Scalability Limit
▪ 1 node only
▪ multi-socket and stacks approaching NUMA
▪ E25K, z10, etc — fail for most purposes

8. Operating System — ?
▪ traditional definition no more relevant
▪ the notion itself on the brink of obsolescence
▪ field heavily eroded by current distributed apps

9. Distributed
Applications
▪ forced to be an OS unto themselves
▪ huge overlap
▪ huge opportunity for sharing and consolidation

10. Anti-Patterns
▪ virtualization
▪ chefs and puppets
▪ thick abstraction

11. Attempts
▪ z/OS
▪ Plan 9, Inferno
▪ Clustrx, E1, DYSEAC, ...
▪ OpenStack (~~)

12. Species Survival Plan
Freeze the bodies and leave them for future generations to fix.

13. Don't Panic:
Incremental
▪ perfection v. done
▪ still a decade or more till a good AI
▪ no practical need for POSIX over a cloud

14. Mindful Approach
▪ immediate practicality
▪ long-term perspective
▪ sustained, integrally rich effect

15. Operating System
▪ major abstraction repository
▪ overlapping code distillery
▪ pre-production architecture research

16. Increments

17. Machine Generated
Data
▪ logs, error messages, status monitors
▪ meant for humans... no more
▪ rethinking for better aggregation and analysis

18. Identity and
Authentication
▪ YP, LDAP outdated and poorly supported
▪ no distributed model
▪ passwd in git as a first stab

19. Remote Procedure Call
▪ ssh losing relevance, HPN or not
▪ all-mighty agent daemon worse than rsh
▪ capabilities, RBAC, WoT

20. Hardware Failures
▪ no culture for low-level fault-tolerance
▪ watchdogd as state-of-the-art self-healing
▪ focus on self-diagnostics: disk error counters, etc

21. Distributed
Configuration
▪ current anti-patterns worsen the problem
▪ role-aware configuration
▪ / in git as a second stab

22. Storage
▪ intra-node redundancy irrelevant
▪ no appropriate local multi-disk FS
▪ no fast path for data exchange
▪ nginx + curl + dispatcher

23. Error Handling
▪ cf MGD and hardware failures
▪ software is 10x more prone to failures
▪ serious problem at scale

24. ☺