Comment by 0xbadcafebee
4 months ago
Why it happened is not nearly as important as what it unveiled: that versioned immutable systems are the most powerful system design concept in history. Most people have not yet grasped what an insanely powerful concept it is. At some point in the future, maybe 50-100 years from now, someone will look back and say "holy shit; deploying web apps are where this concept came from?" I hope in my lifetime that people get it and start applying it to other system designs/components.
radmind had this philosophy. https://radmind.org
It let you create diffs of a filesystem, and layer them with configurations, similar to containers. Useful for managing computer labs at the time.
Well disk (or tape) images are as old as 'dd' and 'tar', that's not the revolutionary part. If the disk is writeable the state is still constantly mutating, so you're fighting a war of attrition (it's configuration management at that point, which is terrible). But a read-only disk that doesn't accrue changes, and only needs a reboot to fix, that's the revolutionary part. Anybody who ran thin-terminals can tell you how reliable and easier to manage those are than a full-blown OS.
At some point in the future people are going to realize that every system should work that way.