One horse or 10K Chickens?

Would you like to ride a carriage pulled by 10K chickens or single horse? The answer is not easy. It is technically cool to distribute a job over many compute units and when done successfully it replaces the workload on a more hospitable economic curve (cheaper, faster, better..). However, not all jobs can be distributed and a complicated system which does distribute it over cheap compute units ends up being so complicated that focus shifts from the job to managing this system.

We just spent over 6 mos trying to distribute a webApp and came to the conclusion that it is not about the app but about the data. We need to distribute the data and have compute thread scheduled on the data. But wasn't that the whole point of OOP?

Anyways, the search for distribution introduced me to blockchain. Here is a distributed network that kind of mimics human networks. It keeps people honest and has potential. stay tuned...

Killer App for Overlay Networking/SDN

SDN has been searching for a killer app since its birth in the midst of protocol and encapsulation debates of 2011. It wasn't monitoring, flow management or physical network orchestration for a controller. It turns out it is container networking.

Container is challenging the VM or a group of them is a unit of application. Its value proposition is removal of the virtualization tax and being open source it does not cost a whole lot to try out. The schedulers (k8, mesos etc.) seem to be maturing fast enough but the networking behind is still quite elementary.

Using offloads that accelerate encap/decap of an overlay network on the JEOS (Just enough OS), containers with virtual interfaces can outperform hypervisor based VMs and integrate better with orchestration technology like gubernetes.