In touch Alexander Chistyakov, I'm an evangelist and tell you about the 9 best technology events of 2019.
In the assessment, I relied more on my own taste than on the opinion of experts. Therefore, this list, for example, did not include unmanned vehicles, because there is nothing fundamentally new and surprising in this technology.
I didn't sort the events in the list by importance or wow effect, because their significance will be clear in ten years, and the wow effect is too short-lived, I just tried to make this story coherent.
1. Portable server applications in the Rust programming language under WebAssembly
I will start the review with two reports:
1. Report read by him back in 2018.
At the time of reading the report, Brian Cantrill was working at Joyent as a CTO and had no idea how 2019 would end for him and Joyent.
2. , a member of the Rust core team and author of “The Rust Programming Language” at Cloudflare, where he talks about the features of the Rust language and WebAssembly technology, which allows web browsers to be used as platforms for running applications.
In 2019 WebAssembly with its , which provides access to operating system objects such as files and sockets, has moved beyond browsers and is targeting the server software market.
The essence of the breakthrough is obvious - humanity has another runtime capable of running portable applications for the Web (does anyone remember the WORA principle, invented by the authors of the Java language?).
In addition, we have a relatively safe way to create these applications thanks to the Rust language, the raison d'être of which is to eliminate entire classes of errors at compile time.
WebAssembly is such a game-changer that Solomon Hykes, one of the creators of Docker, wrote that if WebAssembly and WASI had existed in 2008, Docker simply would not have been born.
It is not surprising that Rust was among the adopters of the new portable technology - its ecosystem is dynamically developing and Rust has been the most beloved programming language for several years according to the results. .
This is a slide from Steve's report that clearly shows the ratio of the number of security bugs that can be completely avoided when using Rust to the total number of bugs found in MS Windows over the past decade and a half.
Microsoft had to somehow respond to such a challenge, and it did.
2. Project Verona from Microsoft, which will save Windows and open a new page of history for any OS
The number of bugs in the Microsoft Windows kernel and most user programs has increased almost linearly over the past 12 years.
In 2019 Matthew Parkinson from Microsoft who can put an end to this.
This is Microsoft's initiative to create a secure programming language based on the ideas of the Rust language: colleagues at Microsoft Research have found that most of the security problems are due to the heavy legacy of the C language, in which most of Windows is written. Rust-like language Verona manages memory and resource concurrency using . If you want to understand how it works in detail, please see .
Interestingly, Microsoft is traditionally perceived as an evil empire and the enemy of everything new, despite the fact that , the main developer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, works specifically for Microsoft.
Brian Cantrill's question from the first paragraph: “Is it time to rewrite the operating system kernel in Rust?” received an unexpected answer - it is obvious that it is not yet possible to rewrite the kernel of the operating system, but programs running in userspace are already being rewritten. An unstoppable process has begun, and this will open a new page of the future for all operating systems.
3. The rise of the popularity of the Dart programming language thanks to the Flutter framework
I am sure that the next news is a big surprise not only for us and the general public, but also for most of the direct participants in the process of its formation. Launched by Google eight years ago, the Dart programming language has exploded in popularity this year.
I use my method of assessing the popularity of programming languages by analyzing repositories on Github, once a month . If at the beginning of the year there were only 100 popular Dart repositories, today there are already 313 of them.
Dart has overtaken Erlang, PowerShell, R, Perl, Elixir, Haskell, Lua, and CoffeeScript in popularity. Faster than any other programming language seems to have grown this year. Why did it happen?
One of the highlights of this year was read by Richard Feldman and was called A significant part of the report is devoted to the analysis of how programming languages become popular. One of the main reasons, according to Richard, is the presence of a popular application or framework, in other words the killer app.
For the Dart language, the reason for the popularity was the mobile application development framework , whose rise in popularity, according to Google Trends, just happened at the beginning of this year.
We don't know anything about Dart since we don't do mobile development, but we warmly welcome another statically typed programming language.
4. A chance for the survival of the Linux kernel and its community thanks to the eBPF virtual machine
We at VDSina love conferences: this year I went to the DevOops conference in St. Petersburg and participated in a round table dedicated to trends and hot things in the industry. In 2019, the leading opinions in such conversations were:
- Docker is dead because it's too boring
- Kubernetes is alive and will last for about a year - they will still talk about it at conferences in 2020
- meanwhile, no living person has looked into the Linux kernel for a long time
I do not share the last point, from my point of view, not just interesting, but revolutionary things are happening in the development of the Linux kernel. The most notable is the eBPF virtual machine, which was originally created to solve the boring task of filtering network packets, and then grew into a general-purpose kernel-level virtual machine.
Development for the Linux kernel: was
Development for the Linux kernel: became
Thanks to eBPF, the kernel now reports the occurrence of events that can be partially processed outside the kernel - the interface allows you to safely and efficiently interact with the kernel from userspace and extend and supplement the functionality of the Linux kernel, bypassing the all-seeing eye of Linus Torvalds.
Before eBPF, developing programs that were closely related to interacting with the Linux kernel was a difficult story - creating things like drivers for not very fast devices and interfaces for file systems in userspace required going through a formal review procedure by experienced Linux kernel developers.
The advent of the eBPF interface greatly simplified the process of writing such programs - the entry threshold has decreased, there will be more developers, and the community will come to life again.
I am not alone in my enthusiasm: declares the importance of eBPF for the survival (!) of the kernel development ecosystem. Another, no less famous developer (I'm a big fan of his) , which has not been equaled for 50 years.
Meanwhile, Linus Torvalds usually does not publicly praise for this, and I can understand him - who wants to publicly make himself look like an idiot? 🙂
5. Linux puts almost the final nail in FreeBSD's coffin with the asynchronous io_uring interface in the Linux kernel
While talking about the Linux kernel, there is another big improvement this year that should be noted: the inclusion of a new by Jens Exbow of Facebook.
For many years FreeBSD sysadmins and developers justified their choice by the fact that FreeBSD did better asynchronous I/O than Linux. For example, this argument Gleb Smirnov from Nginx.
Now the game has been turned upside down. and the performance test results are impressive - the increase in the number of I / O operations per second is from 14% to 102%, depending on the block size. There is a prototype using asynchronous I/O in PostgreSQL (at least ), on transitioning PostgreSQL to asynchronous I/O. But given the conservatism of the developer community, we will not see these changes in 2020 yet.
6. AMD's triumphant return with the Ryzen line of processors
Nothing unusual, it's just that AMD, which has been in the industry for a long time on the sidelines, is breaking record after record.
The new line of Ryzen processors showed an incredible price / performance ratio: they , and in some regions . In the competitive struggle, Intel is forced : Causes programs created with their own compiler to run less efficiently on competitor processors. Despite Intel's dirty ways of fighting, .
7. Following AMD, Apple aims to take a bite out of the Intel pie with iPadOS and old Gates tricks
Everyone who can hold a weapon in their hands usually tries to participate in the battles of giants, and not only AMD claims to feed the Intel base. Apple behaved like an old joke bull.
we're slowly going down the mountainAn old and a young bull stand on the top of a mountain, and a herd of cows graze below.
The young bull offers the old one:
- Listen, let's go down quickly, quickly, f**k on the cow
and quickly, quickly rise back!
— No-no!
- Well, then let's quickly-quickly go down, f**k two cows and quickly-
Let's get back up quickly!
— No-no!
“Well, then what do you propose?”
- We will slowly, slowly go down the mountain, we will transfer the whole herd and
Slowly, slowly back to the place!
With the release of the new iPadOS, Apple used a tactic called “disruptive innovation” against Intel.
Wikipedia definition
Disruptive innovation is innovation that changes the balance of values in the market. At the same time, old products become uncompetitive simply because the parameters on the basis of which competition used to take place lose their meaning.
Examples of "disruptive innovations" are the telephone (replacing the telegraph), steamships (replacing sailing ships), semiconductors (replacing vacuum devices), digital cameras (replacing film), e-mail ("undermined" traditional mail).
Apple uses its own low-power ARM-based processors, and this has proved to be more important to users than the performance that is slightly behind the Intel x86.
Apple manages to snatch a piece of the market, turning the iPad from an entertainment terminal into a full-fledged work tool - first for those who create content, and now for developers. Of course, we won't be seeing an ARM-based MacBook anytime soon, but the little troubles with the design of the MacBook Pro's keyboards are prompting the search for alternative solutions, and one of them promises to be the iPad Pro with iPadOS.
What about Gates and Microsoft?
At one time, Gates pulled exactly the same trick with IBM.
In the 1970s, IBM dominated the server market, shrugging off consumer PCs with the confidence of a giant. In the 1980s, Gates uses IBM money to create and license MS-DOS for it, leaving the rights to the operating system to himself. Having received the money, Microsoft creates a graphical interface for MS-DOS, and Windows is born - at first just a graphical add-on to DOS, and then the first PC operating system that is convenient for use by the masses. IBM, being a big sluggish company, is losing the personal computer market to the young and fast Microsoft. I have summarized this great story very briefly, so if you are wondering how Apple will play against Intel with iPadOS in 2020, I highly recommend it. .
8. Strengthening the positions of ZFSonLinux - the old horse does not spoil the furrow
Canonical Company using the ZFS file system as the root file system directly from the installer. Sometimes it seems to me that the engineers who worked at Sun Microsystems represent a separate biological species of Homo sapiens (Brian Cantrill and Brendan Gregg, already mentioned above, worked at Sun). Judge for yourself, despite years of attempts by all mankind to make something even remotely similar to the ZFS file system, despite intractable licensing restrictions that prevent the ZFS source code from being included in the Linux kernel upstream, we still use ZFS, and in the situation will not change in the near future.
9. Oxide Computer Company - We'll be keeping a close eye on a team that is clearly capable of a lot - at the very least, put on a cool show
I conclude my list with a new mention of Brian Cantrill, which is where I started.
Brian Cantrill and other engineers (some of whom also used to work at Sun) started a business called , whose main goal is to create a server platform suitable for use on a large scale. It is known that very large corporations such as Google, Facebook and Amazon do not use conventional server hardware in their activities. Brian's company aims to eliminate this inequality by developing a software and hardware platform suitable for use by any cloud service (it will not do without the Rust programming language).
Their idea is the promise of a new revolution, and I will at least be happy to watch the movement of their thought and their development in the coming 2020.
What we managed to do in 2019 at VDSina
We did not make technological breakthroughs in 2019 with VDSina, but we still have something to be proud of.
In February, we added the ability to use a local network between servers and launched a domain registration service. The price was made one of the lowest on the market - 179 rubles per ru / rf, including for renewal.
In March, they performed at IT Global Meetup #14.
In April, we increased the channel width for each server from 100 to 200 megabits, significantly increased the traffic limit for all tariffs (except the cheapest one) - up to 32 TB per month.
In July, customers had the opportunity to automatically install Windows Server 2019. Within the Moscow location, they began to provide free DDoS protection.
Also in July, our company appeared on Habré, debuting and how it helped us make a quantum leap in customer support.
In August, we added the ability to create snapshots - server backups.
Rolled out public API.
Increased the bandwidth for each server from 200 to 500 Mbps.
They participated in the Chaos Constructions 2019 conference, distributing whips with the company logo as merchandise (the campaign slogan was “When the developer is on top”) and blew up telegram chats.
In September, we launched the cutest and friendliest Instagram of an IT company — VDSina began to talk about news and everyday life .
In November, we went to Highload++, took part in the “databases in Kubernetes” roundtable and dressed the participants in shark hats.
In December, they spoke at a DevOps meetup in the office of GazpromNeft with a report on databases in Kubernetes and at the DevOpsDays conference in Moscow which was definitely my best performance of the year.
Conclusion
As Nassim Taleb said, it is much easier to predict what we will definitely not see. I want to note that everything new that we will see in 2020 originates back in 2019, 2018 and earlier. I'm not going to predict the future exactly, but 2020 will definitely not be the year of Linux on the desktop (when was the last time you saw the desktop?), and we have been seeing the year of Linux on mobile devices for ten years now.
In any case, I hope that in a year we will meet again and discuss how everything really turned out.
All the upcoming holidays!
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Source: habr.com