Comparing Triton containers to VMs and bare metal servers
In this technical retrospective (2015), @xj9 shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 43 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 21 comments
I've been watching Joyent with interest for a while now, but I don't think I or my employer will be using their public cloud any time soon. Frankly, the pricing standard set by DigitalOcean a couple of years ago, and since followed by Linode (my and my employer's current favorite) and Vultr, is pretty hard to beat. I don't know how I'd justify 2x the price (not even counting bandwidth) when the performance of Linode is good enough. So I'll just continue to watch with interest. Now that SmartDataCenter is open source, maybe someone else will set up an SDC cloud with pricing that's competitive with DigitalOcean and the like. That would suck for Joyent though, so I shouldn't really wish for it.
there are about 60 mentions of the word "container" on that page, including a full chart of questions "Compared to Docker in a VM", such as "Where are containers run"?
But the real question that should be at the top of the file, or at least that table of questions, is "what is a container"?
So: what is a container? (As opposed to a VM.)
Surprising that Joyent used an extremely similar name as Amazon's extremely similar product, EC2 Container Service (EC2 expands to Elastic Compute Cloud, so the full name is Elastic Compute Cloud Container Service)
http://aws.amazon.com/ecs/ ↗
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll50EFquwSo ↗ Building and scaling container driven cloud infrastructure - Bryan Cantrill (Video about Triton)
Containers hosting hardware virtual machines running Windows, FreeBSD, or others
Can't we just describe VMs as VMs and be done with it? So it's a container that has a VM inside it?