One of the proto-verbal design tensions I'm turning over in the back of my mind lately is about the axes that are actually appropriate for subdividing a single-host computing environment into multiple mutually-isolated functional domains. Which is a lot of highfalutin' words, so let me point at a familiar landmark: Docker.
It's pretty easy to say Docker sucks, or containers suck (there are valid arguments there), but they don't tend to appreciate why Docker got so popular in the first place - how containers act like a "desire path" in computing. There's something important there that people needed, and even doing an approximate job with a little marketing was enough to take off in adoption dramatically. Downloadable, portable, manipulable, standardized, self-contained, with the ability to share pieces of the host FS or not, and similar flexibility for networking. Obviously that beats a world of accommodating the quirks of umpteen Linux distros.
#MercuryMicrokernel #Layover
