[Nextgrid]

The other "leak" in these abstractions that arises from physical limits is performance, especially when it comes to IO.

This is a major problem for databases and ultimately makes database "portability"/fault tolerance tricky since they work best with direct-attach storage that's inherently bound to a single physical machine.

[pm90]

Not to mention there is all sorts of other limits that you can hit at scale just on the compute layer itself (eg max pids, file descriptors etc).

I don’t know if we can truly abstract away the underlying system. The best we can do is give a best effort approximation that works in most cases, but explicitly call out the limits when they are reached.

I suspect that this is just the bubbling up of the underlying physics limitation of having limited resources where compute is run.