🔗 Integration, not isolation

In a recent discussion, the comment was made that containers are not always a good fit for edge/embedded devices, as they are designed for isolation (which is useful at times for cloud workloads), but with embedded, we want tight integration. Justin Schneck advocates file-system layers as an alternative. Isolation from the kernel is a feature in the cloud, but in embedded systems, we often need direct access to the kernel (integration).

We, as an industry, perhaps focus too much on isolation (security, protection, every app bundles its own stack of dependencies, etc.). Short term, this is convenient. Long term, this can lead to bloat, inefficiencies, and brittle systems.

Can we have integration AND decoupling? That is a topic for future thinking...