3 Unify the Server With MirageOS
As application developers — and I’m speaking for myself here — going 'lower' than the library level to understand how my programs run quickly fades into a black box. The details of how a humming computer converts electricity into my "Hello, world" program quickly go from clear to a confusing thicket of technology layers. Forty years ago a computer was a comprehensible chunk of hardware. The overall sophistication one had to possess was high, true, but once you’d hurdled over that you could see what was going on. Back then Apple was excitedly advertising the Apple I by pointing out that it had "crystal controlled timing" and a "breadboard area". No, really 'pointing out' in the sense that the had a picture of the board and drew circles and arrows indicating the functional pieces.
This couldn’t be much more different from how things are today. Computers are now rapidly vaporizing into 'the cloud', often leaving people who work with them at a Space Shuttle robot arm’s reach away. The diffuse goal of the DevOps movement is to essentially replace hardware problems with software ones. The configuration and specifications for needed servers have become abstracted to the point that it isn’t at all unusual to talk about 'compute' as a noun. In this way, what was once a box that sat in a businesses' back room is now a kind of fungible vehicle that your software rides around in.