[ThierryBuilds]

I wrote this because I kept seeing developers (myself included) confuse language-level isolation like Python venv with OS-level isolation like Docker. I wanted to trace the actual technical boundaries between them.

The article maps out the differences between common execution environments—from physical bare metal and VMs to containers, process sandboxes, and virtual environments—to create a mental model of where the "isolation boundary" actually sits for each tool.

[ianand]

Since you mention serverless it might be worth mentioning firecracker and v8 isolates.

[pjmlp]

Or CGIs running on httpd inside HP-UX Vaults, that is how old the idea happens to be.

[ignoramous]

> how old the idea happens to be

TFA is missing a host of many a popular isolation techniques like Isolates, Code Interp / Binary Translators [0], Enclaves, Exclaves, Domains/Worlds, (RISC V) SEEs, TEEs, SEs, HSMs, pKVMs ...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38950949

[ThierryBuilds]

Thank you for the feedback. I will definitely add them as example solutions for serverless.

[fuzzfactor]

>1. Physical Machine (Bare Metal) This is the foundation.

Nobody should ever forget this.

But I would say this next part is about the opposite for bare metal though:

>Use Case: High-performance computing (HPC), large databases, or legacy systems that require direct hardware access.

To get the utmost reliability out of adequate hardware then bare metal is more suitable for almost everything except for special situations.

Unless something is really wrong with the software or the overall hardware/software approach.

[ThierryBuilds]

Thanks for the feedback. These are typical use cases where the convenience of higher level abstractions may be less important than the benefits of direct access to the hardware.

[lateral_cloud]

Did you really write it though? Within the first paragraph it's fairly obvious this is heavily LLM-generated.

[aragilar]

It also has weird definitions. Is nix a virtual environment? Is homebrew a virtual environment? Why is a sandbox different to a container? Type-1 vs Type-2 hypervisors are quite different, and there's no discussion about processes vs threads.

[tadfisher]

I don't know what it is about LLM-generated text, but when I read it I cannot understand the meaning it is trying to convey. The words are all there, but it is fatiguing to repeatedly parse phrasing like "it's not X but Y" and "you aren't just X, you are Y". The entire article is organized as a sequence of these statements, and this is not hyperbole.

[zipy124]

Because it is statistical. It has no understanding of the purpose of writing which is to convey information. It can only show you the statistically most likely text, although very good sometimes, it also has its limitations.