> It’s being able to over provision, dynamically reallocate hardware resources, or do things like live migration and entire system snapshots. That hardware/system management aspect is what VM’s give you and containers don’t.
None of those matter in the slightest with containers. Why would you need to reallocate hardware resources when the containers can run on another piece of hardware? You would snapshot the relevant storage, not the whole OS and kitchen sink.
VMs as an intermediary between hardware and containers is just a waste of resources - both directly (RAM, CPU, storage to run a useless OS with no benefit) and indirectly (all of those VM's OS needs maintaining and patching).
It's basically a hold over from the olden days of "everything is a VM".
We run everything on VM just for flexibility. Want to stand up a new machine for testing? Boom, run the script, new Ubuntu server. We need to decommission a machine. Shutdown all the guests, move them over to new machine and start them.
Sure, most of what we do is very cattle and we could run on bare hardware but why not take advantage of easy to add flexibility.
I'm not sure I follow. Ideally your bare metal machines have an easy bare OS with some config that is easy to repave, and are ephemeral-ish (not a lot of state).
Your "machine for testing" would be a container. Decommissioning a container is easy. Decommissioning a physical machine only happens when it's obsolete.
sigh Not everything in the world is containers. Applications running outside of container still exist in many companies for various reasons including political ones.
> More than half of the workloads we see being migrated are Windows. Many more are odd/ancient RHEL versions running some very specific software where the manufacturer won't offer a newer version / went out of business / the guy who set it up left and no one knows how it's configured / it works and we never want to touch it again.
And number of those has nowhere to go but down too. There is no growth in either of those, because everyone who will at some point try to get rid of them. Not all, not immediately, but the ultimate trajectory is down.
People are still setting up machines by hand, then leaving companies without documenting what they did. The whole "infrastructure as code" is a fantasy at most real companies.
Why are you conflating and equating "useful" with "sells for profit on the free market"?
There are many areas of research where profit is not a goal, and cannot be one. Understanding how and why climate changes is extremely important and useful, but cannot turn a profit. Researching different education methods, same. Hell, the researchers who won the 2024 Nobel prize in economics, who helped us understand how to build economically successful nations, something incredibly useful, cannot turn a profit with their research.
It's frankly absurd to expect everything useful to be profitable.
I really don't get why it's so commonly stated. It's so obviously dumb once you think about it for more than 5 seconds. It's like people arguing that improving the track or improving the shoes doesn't win races because at the end of the day it's the runner that crosses the finish line. Sure, but to discredit everything but the runner is so myopic. Let them run barefoot and run on glass shards, then watch them lose
> Understanding how and why climate changes is extremely important and useful, but cannot turn a profit.
That definitely is for profit. They aren't researching climate change for the love of the game, but because agriculture, oil futures, real estate development, insurance policies, all depend on predicting climate developments.
I'd phrase it as people are researching these things because they're important. The reasons they're important are pretty diverse but because of how our economy works the research all ends up being related to profits downstream. Problem is we only measure "profit" as one step back.
To make an analogy, let's pretend we're a company selling water. We measure profit by how many bottles of water we sell. But people like the gp are complaining that building aqueducts, water purifiers, weather machines, or even improving the bottling process "isn't profitable". It's a weird claim and I'm not sure why it's so prolific. It's incredibly myopic
It's not "AI light bulbs", the point is to use smart meters for load shedding and load rearranging. Why wouldn't you want for people and companies to be able to use cheaper electricity in off-peak hours?
> Wait really? I honestly would have thought this was a solved problem by now, especially high quality transcriptions bit, just out of curiosity, is the problem that the quality isn't high enough?
If I had to guess, all of those apps are probably vibecoded, hence the variable quality.
> I wonder if open source licenses will start to include "not to be used for LLM training" clauses
As if the LLM trainers would care. They've ignored every single license and copyright policy out there because "fair transformative use". It's undergoing litigation in various jurisdictions, and the chaotic side of me really wants to see what happens if a UK or California decide that training an LLM on pirated copyrighted material is not fair use, and the rights holders have to be compensated.
jeez, y'all no fun. When bad shit is going down humour is _as_ an appropriate tool as being incredibly obvious. Lingering in a mixed area between the two also makes it considerably harder for censors and the subject to punish the disobedience. Innit?
None of those matter in the slightest with containers. Why would you need to reallocate hardware resources when the containers can run on another piece of hardware? You would snapshot the relevant storage, not the whole OS and kitchen sink.
VMs as an intermediary between hardware and containers is just a waste of resources - both directly (RAM, CPU, storage to run a useless OS with no benefit) and indirectly (all of those VM's OS needs maintaining and patching).
It's basically a hold over from the olden days of "everything is a VM".
reply