Docker went through an era of thinking they could built multitenant systems that amortized the cost of resources across customers. Java went through an era of thinking they could build multitenant VMs that amortized resources across customers. Unix went through an era of thinking they could build multitenant processes that amortized resources across customers. As did Windows.
I point out that Docker is trying - and failing - to offer us the same feature set we were promised by protected memory, preemptive multitasking operating systems 30 years ago. I'm still waiting. I don't recall if there were old farts complaining about this in the early 90's, but I suspect they exist.
Also Java had a bunch of facilities for protection and permissions that I've not heard anyone claim exist in V8. Not that feature equality is required (in fact that may seal your doom), but I don't see feature parity either.
edit: some of facilities Java investigated do exist in cgroups, so one might argue that there is a union of v8 and cgroups that is a superset of Java, but unless I am very mistaken, isolates don't work that way, so isolates are still not the way forward there.
IMHO, this is all a solution chasing a problem. A server from Hetzner costs the equivalent of 30 minutes of my time a month. A VM on a shared machine can cost even less. There's just not cost there to save in order to justify the security risks and performance ghosts. It only makes sense for extremely bursty loads or background processing where latency isn't important. But those are pretty atypical scenarios and usually buying for max load is still cheaper than the engineering time to set up the system.
One server may be 30 mins of your time. But whether that's cost efficient depends on your domain.
There's B2B work typically characterized by a low number of very high value transactions, so you run a few servers, and your math works out.
And then there are consumer services such as Instagram or Google maps or TikTok that see a huge amount of very low value requests that only contribute a small trifling in ad revenue. When your service needs to process millions of requests to pay for your service, your math no longer works out.
One of the beauties of modern computing is that our economies of scale enable us to deliver complex services such as Instagram etc at cost, for free. That's pretty amazing if you think of it, but engineers need to be very stingy for this to work out.
The math still works out because there's not much cost savings to be had in using V8 instead of VM/physical machine instances to share physical equipment cost. It's worth that small extra bit of money to pay to have your code running with the extra bit of protection.
> A server from Hetzner costs the equivalent of 30 minutes of my time a month.
My toy code, which takes ~6ms (at p75) to exec, runs in 200+ locations, serves requests from 150 different countries (with users reporting end-to-end latencies in low 50ms). This costs well below $50/mo on Cloudflare, and $0 in devops. Make what you will of that.
It has seen everything between 10rps to 10000rps, and never once complained. Latencies remain steady, requests remain serviceable, abuse (DDoS/bots) still gets caught, throughput just seems to scale elastically even if not boundlessly.
> I point out that Docker is trying - and failing - to offer us the same feature set we were promised by protected memory, preemptive multitasking operating systems 30 years ago.
You were given them, by those facilities, 30 years ago.
Then someone started fiddling with CPU design, and things got weird.
I point out that Docker is trying - and failing - to offer us the same feature set we were promised by protected memory, preemptive multitasking operating systems 30 years ago. I'm still waiting. I don't recall if there were old farts complaining about this in the early 90's, but I suspect they exist.
Also Java had a bunch of facilities for protection and permissions that I've not heard anyone claim exist in V8. Not that feature equality is required (in fact that may seal your doom), but I don't see feature parity either.
edit: some of facilities Java investigated do exist in cgroups, so one might argue that there is a union of v8 and cgroups that is a superset of Java, but unless I am very mistaken, isolates don't work that way, so isolates are still not the way forward there.