[erlang-questions] Microservices vs. Erlang processes

Lloyd R. Prentice lloyd@REDACTED
Wed Jul 9 18:04:44 CEST 2014


Hi Craig,

You are exploring deep and rich ideas and questions. What a treat! Some may find the discussion too far afield for this list, in which case, we can take it off list. But, in my view, it cuts to the philosophical heart of Erlang system design philosophy and architecture.

Your speculations  entwine both profound technical and cultural issues. Indeed, they come across as a social critique. I'm wondering if it might not help to tease out the essential questions and their implications before second-guessing what VCs might consider or reject.

As one of those fuzzy divergent thinkers coming out of a liberal arts education I don't know how much I can contribute. But here are some questions and associations that pop to mind:

- What is the intrinsic difference between software and hardware; e.g. What is the difference, say, between a digital pid controller, say, and a Watts governor?

- What do the linkages of the Watts governor need to "know" to perform their role in a fully functioning mechanism?

- What does an ant need to "know" to forage for food for it's colony?

- What does a cell need to "know" to contribute to the health and functionality of the larger organism?

- What does a consumer need to "know" to participate in an "economy?"

- What does stone need to "know" to start an avalanche?

- What do we mean by "know?"

Ludwig von Bertalanffy tackled many issues such as these in his General Systems Theory.

http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/history_isd/bertalanffy.html

I do take issue with your characterization of the Internet. As one whose career has been devoted to human communication, I see the web as a multiple-node network or system of bridges, if you will, between human minds. People process and respond to content they receive through the web in more ways than we can enumerate. It's too easy, in my view, to say that they are simply narcotized and turned into consuming robots.

One last thought: Chuck Moore, the mind behind Forth and one of my heroes, has been striving his whole career with but partial success to make the computer "invisible." One wonders how different in degree and function is a processor in his GA144 and an Erlang process?

http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/products/

Do hope we can keep the line of thought going either on or off list.

All the best,

Lloyd


Sent from my iPad

> On Jul 9, 2014, at 5:40 AM, zxq9 <zxq9@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
>> On Monday 07 July 2014 23:54:41 you wrote:
>> Hi Craig,
>> 
>>> The idea of using actual micros for "micro"-sized services is
>>> 
>>> intriguing, but the implications seem to be way outside the realm of the
>>> average web-style VC's imagination.
>> 
>> This is an "intriguing" statement. Can you please elaborate on the
>> implications?
> 
> Hi Lloyd.
> 
> I appologize in advance for the huge and unorganized nature of the post below. 
> Anyone not really interested in this, please skip reading it instead of 
> flaming me for verbosity.
> 
> And so...
> 
> Blurring the lines between physical infrastructure and software infrastructure 
> can become very natural, but it requires a mode of thinking to which neither 
> software people and, say, building architects are accustomed. This is what I 
> am getting at when I vaguely refer to "implications".
> 
> Imagine a bridge where each truss, buttress, suspension cable socket, surface 
> segment, etc. are aware of its location in relation to other pieces, and where 
> each joint was an input device to the larger segment. When actuating joints 
> are used (not unusual at all in large structures, but I've never seen any 
> actuating joints that took readings on their current angle, load/stress, 
> etc.), it suddenly becomes possible for a structure to deduce what external 
> forces must be acting on it to cause its recent collective actuation history 
> -- and if even some of the joints are powered (this can take many forms) it 
> would be possible for a suspension bridge to actively dampen the torquing 
> effect of wind, windmills to actively feather, segmented road designs to react 
> to ground saturation, etc. These ideas have occurred to other people, of 
> course, but the approach to solving the implementation problem has always been 
> procedural at the code level, centralized at the processing level, and 
> ultimately unsafe to build because handling partial failure involves too many 
> cases to handle when looking from the top-level.
> 
> The same ideas necessary for large structure segments to do things well 
> together turn out to be the same ideas necessary very small structure 
> coordination -- spray-on screens, microcontrollers mixed into concrete 
> aggregate, etc. Self discovery, "relative -> definite" orientation discovery, 
> etc. permit a very "sci-fi right now" type design mindset where the difference 
> between physical architecture of everyday devices and the software 
> architecture that makes those devices smart melts away. (I wince at using the 
> term "smart" here -- it is indeed what I mean, but the term has been already 
> so abused that it requires a semantic rebirth.) Any future where we can mimic 
> organic brain activity by recalling ad-hoc paths through physical, incidental, 
> aggregate storage instead of directly retreiving data sets of a known/expected 
> type from a dedicated block device requires this sort of thinking.
> 
> Consider a current-day "smart" coffee maker. It is first a coffee maker, 
> entirely dumb. Then the "smart" bits are tacked on as an afterthought. They 
> are entirely alien to the actual coffee maker. There is very little difference 
> between having an old-fashioned coffee maker controlled by a robot and a 
> "smart" coffee maker. Mr. Bean's morning routine is an equivalent solution 
> from a technical point of view.
> 
> A truly smart coffee maker, on the other hand, would have a point of view. It 
> would not just know how much water was in the reservoir, it would *ask* the 
> reservoir how much water it had available. This means the reservoir would be 
> "smart" as well. If it provides water, why is it only providing water to the 
> coffee maker? Why isn't this part of the building's water supply utility? This 
> makes a lot more sense, actually, but so far nobody has approached kitchen 
> appliances in this way and so a water provision protocol has not yet needed to 
> occur to anyone. And so on.
> 
> There are numerous chicken-and-egg problems involved here, of course, but 
> handling chicken-and-egg situations gracefully is part of what true robustness 
> is really about anyway. Incidentally, chicken-and-egg problems also provide an 
> opportunity to sell two products in place of one: a standalone water device, 
> or "smart provision" add-on to existing water coolers or sinks, in addition to 
> the coffee maker itself. This last point and and consumer case along the lines 
> of the coffee maker example is probably the only hope we could possibly have 
> today of interesting VCs in relooking "micro" services of this form. (I just 
> pulled the coffee maker thing out of my nose, by the way, its not a well 
> thought out idea -- but its sort of a fun example to toy with, because it 
> turns out that finding points of interface among common problems in 
> living/working space management can indeed begin with something so trivial.)
> 
> These are just elementary examples, my point is that truly "micro" sized 
> services embedded in devices which are themselves micro-sized opens a new 
> style of thinking about the concrete problems of the physical world that 
> computers alone are incapable of dealing with and inflexibly built "smart" 
> systems are incapable of evolving around without inordinate amounts of 
> constant retrofit/reprogramming work.
> 
> A lot of time is spent today telling a microcontroller to do exactly procedure 
> "start; A(); B(); C(); end". Usually in C, assembly, or some special extension 
> of C that embraces special hardware features directly. All of that work is 
> obsolete when the scope of the job changes, of course. A lot of time is spent 
> elsewhere writing Java or Objective-C programs for our "smart" phones. Neither 
> system is adequate to take the state of computing a step further than it has 
> already been in the last several decades, because (ironically in the phone 
> case) the languages themselves and the runtime environments within which they 
> execute are simply not designed around the realities of massive concurrency or 
> even particularly well suited to elementary message passing! These languages 
> and environments *still* require special encantations be uttered to take 
> advantage of more than a single processing device or storage location!
> 
> This whole mode of thinking is drastically underpowered in the face of problem 
> spaces larger than "send an email", "open a web page", "run game X", 
> "open_valve()", "print_board()" etc. Sadly, these are the same problems we've 
> already been stubbing our toes on for the last 50 years in software. The only 
> thing that makes the world seem any "smarter" or "more connected" today is 
> that the boob-tube has been renamed to "youtube" and Bruce Wayne isn't the 
> only one who can afford powerful computers in handheld form. What all this 
> computing power is doing, though, is simply wasting cycles in social 
> distractions, mostly as a cover to sell things nobody knew they wanted (or 
> even existed) before the internet or as a cover to track what they do.
> 
> The problem of creating truly intelligent infrastructure, reactive 
> environments, self-recovering *physical* systems, etc. remains, and it remains 
> a space that has been so far only scratched at around the edges, and never 
> really tackled head-on. Since the advent of the web this set of problems seems 
> to have been forgotten entirely, replaced by dreams of quick cash and 
> notoriety. "Entirely" forgotten outside military research, I should add. But 
> they are stubbing their toes as well. In Ada.
> 
> Something like Erlang/OTP (and I really have to include the OTP part here) 
> enables a different way not just of thinking about concurrency, inter-process 
> communication, "process" defined the way "object" used to be, etc. but a whole 
> different culture of thought. The Erlang culture hasn't interfaced much with 
> hardware culture, and "hardware" culture hasn't interfaced much with 
> mechanical, civil, etc. engineering culture, so there hasn't been a lot of 
> cross-pollination yet. Someday this sort of thing will be natural, but for now 
> its very unusual to meet a programmer who is also a hardware developer who is 
> also a construction engineer.
> 
> The magic blocking heisenproblems that have really been holding things up have 
> been concurrency, embedded processing, and routing/addressing across 
> heterogenous, autonomous devices. If this is what we would take "microservices 
> architecture" to mean, which is very nearly what more than one member of this 
> list took the phrase to mean on first reading, we would be headed toward a 
> closer relationship with the physical world and perhaps less enthused by the 
> possibility of using Erlang/OTP to back-end yet another market analytics site 
> or social media platform or CMS platform, etc. on the web.
> 
> OTOH, the brain is the largest erogenous zone and the web targets it readily. 
> Much like rats given the choice between simulated pleasure stimuli and food, 
> it is quite possible that most humans are more interested in being spoon-fed 
> simulated realities than actually dealing with the real world on its own terms 
> in the most powerful ways we can muster.
> 
> I'll close this huge and disorganized post with an excerpt from Wikipedia's 
> page on the Fermi Paradox 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#They_do_exist.2C_but_we_see_no_evidence:
> 
>>    They are too busy online
>> 
>> It may be that intelligent alien life forms cause their own "increasing
>> disinterest" in the outside world. Perhaps any sufficiently advanced
>> society will develop highly engaging media and entertainment well before
>> the capacity for advanced space travel, and that the rate of appeal of
>> these social contrivances is destined, because of their inherent reduced
>> complexity, to overtake any desire for complex, expensive endeavors such as
>> space exploration and communication. Once any sufficiently advanced
>> civilization becomes able to master its environment, and most of its
>> physical needs are met through technology, various "social and
>> entertainment technologies", including virtual reality, are postulated to
>> become the primary drivers and motivations of that civilization.
> 
> -Craig Everett
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