Into the Stack

I only recently regained the ability to write long form.

What if the database had no idea what your WHERE clause clause actually meant until it had already dragged every single row off disk into memory?

I've been thinking about what the bottom of a database should look like if we stop asking it to understand the database.

We've built one Constellation: a few tens of thousands of machines, a ledger, a flock of schedulers, an autoscaler, identity, the works.

Way back in the object-model post I made a point of saying orbit-core has no I/O, no network, no disk, just types and the functions over them, and in the ledger post I kept calling it an append-only, replayable log.

I'll just assume if you're here, you've read Jared and Andrew's posts, if not there are the links.

Config is where most people actually meet an orchestrator, and Kubernetes greets them with YAML.

This is the post where "improve on Borg today" stops being a slogan.

Networking is the one place Orbit refuses to take Borg's advice.

The reclamation post ended on a debt: the whole utilization story depends on the reservation being a good estimate of real usage, and nobody said where that estimate comes from.

Here's a number that should bother you: most clusters run at something like a third of their capacity, and the operators know it, and they pay for the other two thirds anyway.

Everything I've written about so far is the control plane: the ledger, the schedulers, the airlock.

Every system needs a front door, and the front door is where you decide what "allowed in" means before anything inside has to care.

A scheduler is where an orchestrator earns its keep, and it's also where Borg admitted it had painted itself into a corner.

The telemetry plane is the easy half of the state split to describe and the easy half to get quietly wrong.

The Ephemeris is the part of Orbit I was most nervous about, because it's the part that has to be correct.