Scale-out applications need scaled-in virtualization.
« Data center operating systems are emerging as a first-class category of distributed system software. Hadoop, for example, is evolving from a MapReduce framework into YARN, a generic platform for scale-out applications.
To enable a rich ecosystem of diverse applications to coexist on these platforms, providing adequate isolation is crucial. The isolation mechanism must enforce resource limits, decouple software dependencies among applications and the host, provide security and privacy, confine failures, etc. Containers offer a simple and elegant solution to the problem. However, a question that comes up frequently is: Why not virtual machines (VMs)? After all, these systems face a number of the same challenges that have been solved by virtualization for traditional enterprise applications.
All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection, except of course for the problem of too many indirections” — David Wheeler
Why not virtual machines?
While YARN and systems like it face problems similar to those addressed by VMs for traditional applications, a number of reasons make VMs unsuitable for scale-out context. »
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By Dinesh Subhraveti
Source: radar.oreilly.com