While I love the post, I just kinda have to lol that it all ends up back where we started with ext4 atop a block device.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Now look, I’m not about to try and stop folks from finding new ways of solving problems, especially in infrastructure. Far from it, I love seeing what you beautiful diamonds come up with that works for you. They make for amazing reads!
Except 99.999% of infrastructure needs to be boring, bland, basic, and bulletproof. Most Infra folks will take the minor inefficiencies associated with object storage because we’re not a unicorn startup where solving such a problem could save us millions of dollars a year in write calls to our hypercloud provider; we’re far too busy trying to get our internal customers to stop overscheduling VMs or implement the latest executive shiny project. We need our underlying abstractions - hypervisors, storage arrays, network cores - to work, without fuss and with minimal maintenance.
So while it’s super neat that Fly.io has shared this, and they absolutely have a relevant and beneficial use case for reinventing the proverbial wheel, it’s important to note they are the edge case, not the norm.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Now look, I’m not about to try and stop folks from finding new ways of solving problems, especially in infrastructure. Far from it, I love seeing what you beautiful diamonds come up with that works for you. They make for amazing reads!
Except 99.999% of infrastructure needs to be boring, bland, basic, and bulletproof. Most Infra folks will take the minor inefficiencies associated with object storage because we’re not a unicorn startup where solving such a problem could save us millions of dollars a year in write calls to our hypercloud provider; we’re far too busy trying to get our internal customers to stop overscheduling VMs or implement the latest executive shiny project. We need our underlying abstractions - hypervisors, storage arrays, network cores - to work, without fuss and with minimal maintenance.
So while it’s super neat that Fly.io has shared this, and they absolutely have a relevant and beneficial use case for reinventing the proverbial wheel, it’s important to note they are the edge case, not the norm.