So, actually reading the paper. What it appears that they are doing is blowing up the concept of a 'server' entirely, and replacing the system bus with network. So you can have a bunch of 'servers' racked together which create a pool of cpus, ram, storage, and so on, all of which are connected by the network. And then they pull from this pool of resources to create vNodes which are like virtual machines.
I like the idea. It'll be interesting to see it develop. It could be the core of the next ec2, or I guess it could be nothing.
The Plan 9 source license was $1,000,000 USD (1.6M today). Not exactly pocket change. There was also the problem that Bell Labs didn't have a marketing team. Lucent tried to market Inferno and it did make it into a few Lucent products.
If anyone is interested in Plan 9 then head over to 9front.org and grab an iso. That or there is an accompanying fork of inferno named Purgatorio of which there is now a docker image.
A lot of closed source operating systems or as they are called back then an operating system (open was the exception) were successful and failures. Just like today both closed and open OS fail
> What it appears that they are doing is blowing up the concept of a 'server' entirely, and replacing the system bus with network. So you can have a bunch of 'servers' racked together which create a pool of cpus, ram, storage, and so on, all of which are connected by the network. And then they pull from this pool of resources to create vNodes which are like virtual machines.
Sounds to me a lot like a Beowulf cluster, is it not?
I like the idea. It'll be interesting to see it develop. It could be the core of the next ec2, or I guess it could be nothing.