[Info-vax] OpenVMS servers and clusters as a cloud service

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-01-11 05:20:02 +0000, DaveFroble said:

> In our applications, we have a message manager, and all background 
> tasks get their assignments through the message manager.  When we want 
> them down, we just send a command to the message manager, and it 
> directs all active background tasks to shut down gracefully.  Rather 
> simple.  Works very well.
> 
> Even if some of the things you mention were available, application 
> designers would still have to figure out how to use them, and to 
> implement that usage.

No, your approach does not work well.  Sure, it works.  It certainly 
works for your particular current needs.   Well enough.   Now 
ponder....  That approach also means different piles of different 
source code that gets repeated differently all over the place, in every 
app on the box.  Or maybe that your current approach or other 
approaches might miss cases or events that are relevant, but that don't 
arise often.  (Attempts at DT are great at finding those odd cases, 
too!)    Or that app-specific code increasingly doesn't get 
implemented, and long-running jobs have to be restarted.   Or ponder 
that the source code gets implemented completely differently, with 
different commands and different syntax and different tools and 
different designs and different requirements in different files 
manually entered in different places in different ways by different 
folks with absolutely no consistent (and we all know that some folks 
believe that "reading the manual is admitting defeat"), with no 
repeatability and no modularity around installations and removals and 
upgrades and patches, and with yet more work required around any 
integration with the inevitable and eventual requirements for better 
automation and replication of our apps.   With the likelihood of 
unexpected conflicts arising when there are requirements for apps to 
cohabit on a server.  To many ways that this all goes wrong, and with 
increasing efforts inevitably involved.  Or folks just look at all the 
OpenVMS complexity and roll-your-own requirements and the 
piles-of-glue-code needed here and think to themselves: "I'll use 
Linux, because $(reasons)".

TL;DR: Getting OpenVMS loaded onto an arbitrary server and booted and 
getting software packages loaded and running on that server — whether 
that's all on your own servers or on hosted servers or as guests or 
whatever — desperately needs to get easier.



-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC