I haven’t SSH’d into a machine/container to debug or fix a production issue in years. You flat out can’t even SSH into anything on the last few prod setups I’ve worked on: permissions prevent it, and most containers have sshd and friends stripped out.

I would love a super slimmed down stack to run workloads on. Most of the time when I run workloads, I want to run the workload and nothing else. The OS in the container exists to start the binary I care about and then basically very little else-these applications aren’t making use of a scheduler, or the init system (because again, I’m only running my binary), users and permissions go unused a good chunk of the time. With stuff like quic becoming more popular we’ve got user space networking too, so that’s out. So by this stage we’ve got a whole OSCthats doing almost nothing except passing stuff between layers an incurring a performance and risk overhead.

If we could have the same functionality, with better performance and the same or better security, why wouldn’t I do that?

> This concept has been done multiple times and has always failed

Isn’t it likely that this idea was just “before its time”? The compute landscape these days is pretty different to ~20+ years ago: massively available public cloud compute, prolific container usage, etc. Software stacks are deeper, more ossified and less fully understood than ever, I definitely see solutions that reduce that complexity being appealing.