Bash as a Service

Re:Bash as a Service by mkjones on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @04:19PM (#3700213)

Sounds like "root my box as a service."

As one of the commenters there points out, you can just do this with ssh. Which means you're ssh'ing to a machine you probably control, which means you would have had to install the stuff you want at some point on that machine anyway. Why not just do all your development from that machine (or, if you don't want to, why not just install the package on your local machine?).

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Re:Bash as a Service by mindslight on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @04:24PM (#3700237)

Some people, when confronted with a simple problem, think "I know, I'll add a cloud". Now they have two problems.

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Re:Bash as a Service by sciurus on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @04:29PM (#3700266)

I think the authors idea is that you would ssh to a machine that someone else controls and is providing access to. E.G. For a dollar a month I'll give you shell access to a machine where I've set up ImageMagick, and I'll give you a set of scripts that make running ImageMagic commands on your machine transparently run them on mine instead.

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Re:Bash as a Service by 286c8cb04bda on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @07:04PM (#3700779)

Yes, the value here is in 'where I've set up ImageMagick'.

If I have a task that could be made easier by having ImageMagick, but I don't have it on any machine I have easy access to, then I have to deal with the overhead of getting the package, installing the package, configuring the package, and possibly removing the package when I'm done.

Even though I know how to do all things, it would take me some time to get it all done, and then I'd have to waste brainpower in those things, and not the real problem I'm trying to solve.

A lot of that is solved by the "better" distributions, e.g. Debian has nearly everything under the sun.

But not everything. That's where the opportunity might be.

I probably wouldn't pay a dollar a month just for ImageMagick, but I might pay a few for shell access to a machine that has all of the new and shiny things available, things too new to get into the main repositories, and keeps them up-to-date and keeps adding new stuff, so I don't have to handle the sysadmin tasks for yet-another-box.

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Re:Bash as a Service by drivebyacct2 on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @04:56PM (#3700397)

Sounds like a webservice with a REST API. Every non-Windows computer comes with a client out of the box.

In fact, for some of these things, I think I've seen REST APIs in existence, for the text and image conversion ones. The imagined "ru" command could just be a function or alias to curl/wget.

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Re:Bash as a Service by swah on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @04:43PM (#3700333)

I understood it as "run a this command in an implementation that is parallelized and runs in 1000's of machines but has the same interface.

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Re:Bash as a Service by icebraining on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @05:01PM (#3700417)

     parallel --onall my-command

Done! (Assuming you've added the SSH logins to ~/.parallel/sshloginfile)

For example, to use them to convert a bunch of images from PNG to JPG:

    find . --name '*.png' | parallel --onall --trc {.}.jpg "convert {} {.}.jpg"

This takes care of sending the PNGs and retrieving the JPGs. Now you just need a few aliases to hide the parallel.

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Re:Bash as a Service by davidcuddeback on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @06:30PM (#3700676)

Thank you!

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Re:Bash as a Service by Rauchg on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @04:38PM (#3700304)

What @sciurus says. And virtualization for security.

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