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bri3dtoday at 4:30 PM1 replyview on HN

Yes:

* There's an enormous amount of very expensive shared state (context cache) which you do not want to duplicate when you can avoid it.

* Memory locality is crucially important for performance.

* Hardware is extremely over-subscribed.

* Hardware is extremely expensive.

These factors all make hardware or even traditional memory-space (hypervisor/VM/hardware assisted virtualization) isolation a non-starter for most workloads and customers, which forces all isolation to the software layer. This already makes things way harder than they are in commodity SaaS.

Moving beyond that, the tools, frameworks, and hardware which the system runs on (GPU) wasn't designed for task isolation and building this isolation is even moreso an emergent research field than it is in x86 CPU hardware-sharing (which has required a huge amount of effort over the past 30+ years to get where we are today).

And, the ratio of usage/sensitivity to maturity is also just poor overall; these are young companies with rapid development and enormous delivery pressure under incredible customer workload requirements, too.

I can't tell if the original post is a real issue or not, but I'm surprised there aren't more like this overall; the whole thing really is a house of cards in this sense.


Replies

jstummbilligtoday at 5:10 PM

> which forces all isolation to the software layer. This already makes things way harder than they are in commodity SaaS.

Is this not what happens in most SaaS? Isolation at the software layer? I understand there are special agreements, but they seem to be mostly that – no?

> the ratio of usage/sensitivity to maturity is also just poor overall; these are young companies with rapid development and enormous delivery pressure under incredible customer workload requirements, too.

Mh. The talent density in these companies is apparently quite exceptional. Things like customer data separation is something that is obvious and top of mind. I don't see why they would not hire the best to implement these relatively boring/solved things correctly at an architectural level.

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