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 talk that clearly shows the ratio of the number of security bugs that can be completely avoided by using Rust to the total number of bugs in MS. Windows, found 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 will open a new page of history for any OS
Number of bugs in the Microsoft kernel Windows and most user programs have increased almost linearly over the past 12 years.
In 2019 Matthew Parkinson from Microsoft who can put an end to this.
This is a Microsoft initiative to create a secure programming language based on the ideas of the Rust language: colleagues from Microsoft Research found that most of the security problems are associated with the heavy legacy of the C language, in which most of the WindowsThe Rust-like language Verona manages memory and concurrent access to resources 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. Chance of core survival Linux 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, in the core Linux no living person has looked in for a long time
I do not share the last point, from my point of view, in the development of the kernel Linux Things are happening right now that aren't just interesting, they're revolutionary. The most notable is the eBPF virtual machine, which was originally created to solve the tedious task of filtering network packets and has since evolved into a general-purpose kernel-level virtual machine.
Development for the kernel Linux: was
Development for the kernel Linux: it became
With eBPF, the kernel now reports events that can be partially handled outside the kernel—the interface makes it possible to safely and efficiently interact with the kernel from userspace and extend and complement kernel functionality. Linux, bypassing the all-seeing eye of Linus Torvalds.
Before eBPF, the development of programs whose activities are closely related to interaction with the kernel Linux was a complicated story—creating things like drivers for slow devices and interfaces for file systems in userspace required a formal review process by experienced kernel developers. Linux.
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 almost hammered the final nail into FreeBSD's coffin with the asynchronous io_uring interface in the kernel Linux
Since we're talking about the core Linux, it is necessary to note another significant improvement that occurred this year: the inclusion of a new core by Jens Exbow of Facebook.
For many years, FreeBSD system administrators and developers justified their choice by the fact that FreeBSD had better asynchronous I/O than LinuxFor 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, confidently ignoring personal computers for the average person. In the 1980s, Gates used IBM's funds to create and license MS-DOS, retaining the operating system rights for himself. Having received the money, Microsoft created a graphical interface for MS-DOS, and the world of computers was born. Windows — initially just a graphical overlay on DOS, and then the first PC operating system convenient for the masses. IBM, a large, unwieldy company, lost the personal computer market to the young and fast Microsoft. I've summarized this remarkable story very briefly, so if you're interested in how Apple will compete with Intel in 2020 with iPadOS, I highly recommend it. .
8. Strengthening ZFSon's positionLinux — an old horse doesn't spoil the furrow
Canonical Company using the ZFS file system as the root file system directly from the installer. Sometimes I think the engineers who worked at Sun Microsystems represent a separate biological species of Homo sapiens (the aforementioned Brian Cantrill and Brendan Gregg worked at Sun). Judge for yourself, despite years of humankind's efforts to create something even remotely resembling the ZFS file system, despite the insurmountable licensing restrictions preventing the inclusion of the ZFS source code in the mainline kernel development branch. Linux, we are still using ZFS and this will not change anytime soon.
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 were given the option to automatically install Windows Server 2019. Free DDoS protection began to be provided within the Moscow location.
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's much easier to predict what we definitely won't see. I'd like to point out that everything new we'll see in 2020 has its origins in 2019, 2018, and earlier. I won't attempt to accurately predict the future, but 2020 certainly won't be the year Linux on the desktop (when was the last time you saw a desktop?) and the year Linux We've been seeing this on mobile devices for about 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
