Title: Turtles all the way down: native containers, native code
Description:
We need to talk about our reliance on virtualization.
Most of us seem to be running Java virtual machines on top of virtual machines, so I’d like to look at both VMs and the JVM. At a time when performance is at a high premium in terms of power consumption and cost of compute cycles, are the trade-offs still worth it?
Now is a good time to take stock of how far container and technology and tooling have caught up with full virtualization, and to gauge the promise of a new family of languages that compile to native code. It’s hardly a coincidence that one of them, Go, dominates Linux container management and orchestration.
Nevertheless, the last time this question came up, the decision taken was to place all containers on a VM layer; the JVM was never in doubt. Is it too early to dream of native code running in native containers on physical hardware?