HACKER Q&A
📣 asim

Will there be a new operating system for the Cloud?


It feels as though Cloud is going through a similar path as mobile and smartphones. The hardware is fairly complex, vendors initially packaged their own OS along with the hardware with fairly rudimentary functionality and a terrible experience. It took the iPhone and Android to really redefine mobile and make sense of that complex platform.

Cloud feels the same. Its complex hardware now governed by the likes of AWS who have packaged their own horrible "OS" on top and unique snowflake APIs. GCP is slightly better but the reality is its all still fairly hard to get your head around. What I wonder is whether we'll see an operating system for the Cloud. I don't think kubernetes is that. Its a kernel but I don't think it really has that user friendly experience we're looking for or really even defines the category of Cloud.

What would something like this even look like? I'd say maybe CLI driven and a focus on creating APIs that are all uniform. I don't know if a web experience would even really exist for it but if it did I know it would be a fairly standardised single view pane.

Thoughts?


  👤 dyingkneepad Accepted Answer ✓
I'm not sure I completely understand what you are asking.

Regarding uniformity of APIs (in other words: Standards), this has been talked about ever since the Grid Computing term was coined. It just never became widely accepted.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globus_Toolkit

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Grid_Forum

Is this what you were asking for?


👤 hodgesrm
A lot of people think Kubernetes is the answer you are looking for.