But even in cloud computing, the really compelling offerings (ie serverless) is all containers. Xen is only used as an additional security boundary (ie Docker running on top of Xen). Containers are the software abstraction providing the “distributed” aspect of the GPs argument.

And as for Hyper-V, that’s only there for people locked into the Windows ecosystem. You rarely see much distributed computing happening in Windows. Frankly it’s silly to even mention Windows in the same conversation as Plan 9 and other distributed systems.

Okay, but lets say containers are how we manage applications at scale. And so now you want these containers to still be distributed among regions, among different computers, to be increasingly interconnected, online, to be efficient. Maybe even you want kubernetes on bare metal for extra performance. Lets say that's the trend. Where is it going? Its moving towards grouping together heterogenous hardware in different locations as a single abstraction and managing that. You're going to want to abstract away various forms of memory, processors, GPUs, networking, file systems, and you're going to want something like a task manager, you're going to want to manage permissions and licenses. That is, you want the next layer of abstraction beyond that of a single computer. Docker, virtualization, hyperconverged disaggregated infrastructure - whatever the specific incarnation is, they represent different solutions to the same underlying, long-term trends.

You’re making a really vague meta point here. Yes I do agree that scaling horizontally has is presently more economical than scaling vertically. But that has also been true for years — for about as long as x86 servers have been around. So even longer than you’re original argument about virtualisation. Furthermore you don’t really need any distributed layer to achieve that either. In the early days I used to manage fleets of x86 bare metal servers with little more than a few shells scripts I hastily cobbled together.

Saying “infrastructure needs to scale” is such a generalised truism that it doesn’t really contribute anything to the discussion. And the way how Plan 9 manages scale vastly different to how Docker, VMWare and other solutions manage scale.

I do get the general point you’re making. I honestly do. But as I said in my initial post, it’s not a new trend nor emerging trend like you claimed. It’s already been the industry norm for the lifetime of most engineers careers.

So the real crux of our disagreement isn’t about technology nor whether infrastructure at scale is even needed, it’s the timeline you suggested. You’re out by a couple of decades — so far out that entire architectural designs to solve these problems have come and gone.