[en4bz]

We've gone full circle. Originally there was shared hosting whiched hosted your app in ring 3 with other users on the same physical machine running which ran in ring 0. Then we got fancy virtualization hardware where the hypervisor ran in ring -1, your VM ran in ring 0 and your apps ran in ring 3. But that's a lot of indirection so micro kernels move your app into ring 0. So now we're basically back at shared hosting where your app runs one level higher than the host OS. Except now your app also bundles a partial OS and has weak debugging tools. It does have better isolation though then shared hosting so that's a plus.

But containers are basically the same thing but with better debug support and a more familiar OS environment. Problem is containers need to be deployed on metal to be effective, not VMs. Unfortunately not many providers do this yet.

So yeah it is all kinda crazy.

[mwcampbell]

> Unfortunately not many providers do this yet.

Samsung just acquired Joyent, which provides multi-tenant container hosting on bare metal via Illumos and LX-branded zones. So to me, the acquisition further validates that approach.

[wmf]

Based on this blog post, unikernels also need a special hypervisor (presumably with femto-sized VMs with second-granularity billing) so you might as well run containers.