A Glimpse of a Truly Elastic Cloud 201
New submitter cloudozer writes "Virtual servers in the future may stop using OSes entirely. As recently demonstrated OS-less platforms may change our understanding of how long does it take to bring a server up. A demo server gets created, booted up, configured, runs an application and shuts down in under 1 second. Radically lower startup latency means that the computing infrastructure may be woven strictly on demand, during the processing window allotted for a given request. Currently cloud providers round an instance uptime to the full hour when calculating charges. They might need to switch to per-second billing if OS-less instances get traction. The demo uses a new Erlang runtime system capable of running directly on Xen hypervisor."
Re:A real server OS. (Score:5, Informative)
Linux scales insanely well. You can boot it from flash on an ARM based system in a couple of seconds. Intel demonstrated booting from cold to a graphical desktop in five seconds years ago.
Re:"stop using OSes"? (Score:5, Informative)
Unless we're returning to the 1940s and wiring up tubes to make programs,
I had a few games on bootable floppies back in the original PC days, around 1985. The floppies would boot up the computer right into the game so there was no OS involved. And no, BIOS is not some kind of bisexual OS, it stands for Basic Input/Output System.
Re:"stop using OSes"? (Score:2, Informative)
BIOS is a OS as a OS is a input/output system... lol...