[tptacek]

Lot of similarities!

At a low level, there are distinctions like Sparrow being explicitly p2c based (choose two random workers, then use metrics to pick the "best" between them). We don't p2c at all right now; part of our idea is being able to scale-from-zero to serve incoming requests with sleeping Fly Machines, rather than keeping everything online. And, of course, we run whole VMs (/Docker containers), not jobs with fixed definitions running on long-running executors --- but that's just a detail.

My sense of it is that the big distinction though is that you'd run Sparrow alongside a classic scheduler design like Mesos or Borg or Omega. You'd schedule placement-sensitive servers with the Borglike, and handle Lambda-style HTTP request work with the Sparrowlike.

What we're working on instead if whether you can build something sufficiently Borg-like on top of something Sparrow-like, using "Sparrow-style" scheduling as a low-level primitive. This doesn't quite capture what we're doing (the scheduling API we export implicitly handles some constraints, for instance), but is maybe a good way to think about it.

I should have cited this paper! Thanks for linking it.