[Info-vax] Distributed Applications, Hashgraph, Automation

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-02-22 07:01:50 +0000, Jim Johnson said:

> For the questions around the ancillary complexity, there are roughly 
> two answers.  First, for applications of any scale, configuration and 
> deployment are fully automated.  This makes propagating, e.g. firewall 
> rules, very straightforward.  I've honestly not encountered this as an 
> issue.

There's not really a firewall available on OpenVMS prior to the new 
stack, so that part's easy.   On OpenVMS, installation and 
configuration is still a substantial issue.  It's all home-done, if 
it's been automated.  No profiles, no provisioning.  The pinnacle of 
the OpenVMS installations is still the factory-installed software (FIS) 
package, and not the mainline OpenVMS installer.

> Fwiw, I'd assume that many of the basic items they could do to help as 
> a scalable workload would be common with other requirements - such as 
> improvements in configuration management complexity and time - 
> especially around addition and removal of cluster nodes.

Ayup.   OpenVMS still treats and still packages IP as an optional 
add-on and not as an always-available and integrated system component, 
and the complexity and the installation and configuration and related 
efforts unfortunately all tend to increase from there.  Way too much of 
a product installation is in dealing with the permutations that all 
these options and all this flexibility inherently produces, or just 
punting the whole problem over to the documentation and the person 
installing the product kit, or installing OpenVMS itself.  
Pragmatically, who still runs an OpenVMS system without an IP stack, 
and — in 2020 or 2025 — is it really worth catering to those folks that 
don't use IP first and foremost, and not to everybody else that 
actually uses IP networking, and shutting off the always-present IP 
stack for the handful of OpenVMS folks that don't use it?  There's a 
lot of that in OpenVMS, and there are a lot of folks that are used to 
the flexibility and the complexity.  Some of that is good.  But there's 
a whole lot of the current installation and configuration and product 
packaging that's little more than legacy-preserving absurdity.   
There's massive amounts of incremental work here, keeping the current 
folks from porting while also incorporating changes to the platform 
intended to attract newer partners and newer deployments.  And changes 
that make for easier deployments onto Amazon, Azure or otherwise — 
getting rid of the need for an out-of-band console for initial software 
install and configuration, quite possibly — is almost certainly on the 
VSI development list, though not at the top.



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