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Containers are here to stay and almost certainly will be the new abstraction of computation.

My big question is around a service like AWS Lambda. Is that not already the logical conclusion of container based computation? If magic units of computation can run instantly on demand, what more do you need?

No hosts, but also no OS images, and no specific containerization tools!

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It's a massive shame that PiCloud went down as that had containerized environments, extremely fast startups and auto scaling. It was one of the few things I've used that really solved my small-scale data processing problems simply and cheaply.

> If magic units of computation can run instantly on demand, what more do you need?

Some control over flow, scaling and batching wrap everything up for me. Startup times for my code are non-zero even if the environment is, and adding on queues with a "batch grab" means I can scale things far more sensibly (I can cram a lot of stuff into a single matrix mul if I can pull 100 items at a time from a queue).

I really, really miss picloud :(

We rebuilt picloud as a foray into the getcarina.com space - https://github.com/cloudpipe/cloudpipe we're going to be bringing that back now that carina is landed.

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