<blockquote>
  <p>Are those typically "microservices" or is this something different?</p>
</blockquote>

<p>"Cloud-ish" services could include microservices. I would include services that are replicated and/or load-balanced, such that you can sustain downtime on a single machine, VM, or running binary without service disruption.</p>

<p>Their differentiation of VM-like services looks like services which have a lot of local state (in memory or on disk) where frequent restarting would incur lots of downtime (from either the time it takes to boot/populate a new VM or because the service is singly-homed.)</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Would you put applications that scale on demand as part of those
  "cloud-ish" services, or would they fall into the "lightweight
  compute engine" category instead?</p>
</blockquote>

<p>They could be in either category. Scaling on demand is a commonly-used "feature" of Cloud computing. Think of "Lightweight compute engine" tasks as things like batch jobs, manually run jobs, one-offs etc.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-03-05T21:40:23.690Z
2019-03-05T21:40:23.690Z
Eric Harvieux
<p>Calling containers cloud-ish is simply child-ish. :)</p>

<p>Well, I think the author is trying to classify the containers on the basis of their life-times. I don't see that they have considered any form of Agile working methodology here. In SCRUM, for instance, you would not have the containers running more than a few days. A very aggressively agile team would probably push new containers several times a day, thereby destroying older containers. Also, I think the dataset is small for a concrete classification in this case.</p>

<p>And here's to answering the question for the sake of it. :)</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Are those typically "microservices" or is this something different?</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Ans: Assuming that the data is correct, I would say the short-lived containers are mostly created for managing load. This could be microservices or asynchronous processing(where a container is killed after job is completed).</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Would you put applications that scale on demand as part of those "cloud-ish" services, or would they fall into the "lightweight compute engine" category instead?</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Ans: They can be either the Lightweight or the 'cloud-ish' servers depending upon what the load is computed to be.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-02-25T13:16:03.497Z
2019-02-26T06:30:08.917Z
2019-02-26T06:30:08.917Z
KatariaA
<p>According to <a href="https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slides/cc15_mcguire.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slides/cc15_mcguire.pdf</a> p21-23, Kevin McGuire  of New Relics classifies the containers in three categories:</p>

<ul>
<li>VM-like with a lifetime > 1000h</li>
<li>"Cloud-ish" with a lifetime between 24 and 1000 hours</li>
<li>Lightweight compute engine with a lifetime &lt; 24h (and even &lt;1h for 46% of them)</li>
</ul>

<p><a href="https://i.sstatic.net/ZCqnL.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.sstatic.net/ZCqnL.png" alt="https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slides/cc15_mcguire.pdf p21-23, Kevin McGuire  of New Relics"></a></p>

<p>I have hard-time to clearly define what are the "cloud-ish" containers:</p>

<ol>
<li>Are those typically "microservices" or is this something different?</li>
<li>Would you put applications that scale on demand as part of those "cloud-ish" services, or would they fall into the "lightweight compute engine" category instead?</li>
</ol>

<terminology><term-disambiguation>
Are microservices "cloud-ish medium-lived services"?
Sylvain Leroux
# Are microservices "cloud-ish medium-lived services"?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2019-02-25)

According to <https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slides/cc15_mcguire.pdf> p21-23, Kevin McGuire of New Relics classifies the containers in three categories:

* VM-like with a lifetime > 1000h
* "Cloud-ish" with a lifetime between 24 and 1000 hours
* Lightweight compute engine with a lifetime < 24h (and even <1h for 46% of them)

[![https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slides/cc15_mcguire.pdf p21-23, Kevin McGuire  of New Relics](https://i.sstatic.net/ZCqnL.png)](https://i.sstatic.net/ZCqnL.png)

I have hard-time to clearly define what are the "cloud-ish" containers:

1. Are those typically "microservices" or is this something different?
2. Would you put applications that scale on demand as part of those "cloud-ish" services, or would they fall into the "lightweight compute engine" category instead?

**Tags:** terminology, term-disambiguation


---

## 2 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2019-03-05. Score: 1

> Are those typically "microservices" or is this something different?

"Cloud-ish" services could include microservices. I would include services that are replicated and/or load-balanced, such that you can sustain downtime on a single machine, VM, or running binary without service disruption.

Their differentiation of VM-like services looks like services which have a lot of local state (in memory or on disk) where frequent restarting would incur lots of downtime (from either the time it takes to boot/populate a new VM or because the service is singly-homed.)

> Would you put applications that scale on demand as part of those
> "cloud-ish" services, or would they fall into the "lightweight
> compute engine" category instead?

They could be in either category. Scaling on demand is a commonly-used "feature" of Cloud computing. Think of "Lightweight compute engine" tasks as things like batch jobs, manually run jobs, one-offs etc.


---

### Answer by username_2 on 2019-02-25. Score: 0

Calling containers cloud-ish is simply child-ish. :)

Well, I think the author is trying to classify the containers on the basis of their life-times. I don't see that they have considered any form of Agile working methodology here. In SCRUM, for instance, you would not have the containers running more than a few days. A very aggressively agile team would probably push new containers several times a day, thereby destroying older containers. Also, I think the dataset is small for a concrete classification in this case.

And here's to answering the question for the sake of it. :)

> Are those typically "microservices" or is this something different?

Ans: Assuming that the data is correct, I would say the short-lived containers are mostly created for managing load. This could be microservices or asynchronous processing(where a container is killed after job is completed).

> Would you put applications that scale on demand as part of those "cloud-ish" services, or would they fall into the "lightweight compute engine" category instead?

Ans: They can be either the Lightweight or the 'cloud-ish' servers depending upon what the load is computed to be.


---

