The Quest to Make Code Work Like Biology Just Took A Big Step

THE QUEST TO MAKE CODE WORK LIKE BIOLOGY JUST TOOK A BIG STEP

|Chef CTO Adam Jacob.CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED

IN THE EARLY 1970s, at Silicon Valley’s Xerox PARC, Alan Kay envisioned computer software as something akin to a biological system, a vast collection of small cells that could communicate via simple messages. Each cell would perform its own discrete task. But in communicating with the rest, it would form a more complex whole. “This is an almost foolproof way of operating,” Kay once told me. Computer programmers could build something large by focusing on something small. That’s a simpler task, and in the end, the thing you build is stronger and more efficient. 

The result was a programming language called SmallTalk. Kay called it an object-oriented language—the “objects” were the cells—and it spawned so many of the languages that programmers use today, from Objective-C and Swift, which run all the apps on your Apple iPhone, to Java, Google’s language of choice on Android phones. Kay’s vision of code as biology is now the norm. It’s how the world’s programmers think about building software. 

In the ’70s, Alan Kay was a researcher at Xerox PARC, where he helped develop the notion of personal computing, the laptop, the now ubiquitous overlapping-window interface, and object-oriented programming.
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But Kay’s big idea extends well beyond individual languages like Swift and Java. This is also how Google, Twitter, and other Internet giants now think about building and running their massive online services. The Google search engine isn’t software that runs on a single machine. Serving millions upon millions of people around the globe, it’s software that runs on thousands of machines spread across multiple computer data centers. Google runs this entire service like a biological system, as a vast collection of self-contained pieces that work in concert. It can readily spread those cells of code across all those machines, and when machines break—as they inevitably do—it can move code to new machines and keep the whole alive. 

Now, Adam Jacob wants to bring this notion to every other business on earth. Jacob is a bearded former comic-book-store clerk who, in the grand tradition of Alan Kay, views technology like a philosopher. He’s also the chief technology officer and co-founder of Chef, a Seattle company that has long helped businesses automate the operation of their online services through a techno-philosophy known as “DevOps.” Today, he and his company unveiled a new creation they call Habitat. Habitat is a way of packaging entire applications into something akin to Alan Kay’s biological cells, squeezing in not only the application code but everything needed to run, oversee, and update that code—all its “dependencies,” in programmer-speak. Then you can deploy hundreds or even thousands of these cells across a network of machines, and they will operate as a whole, with Habitat handling all the necessary communication between each cell. “With Habitat,” Jacob says, “all of the automation travels with the application itself.” 

That’s something that will at least capture the imagination of coders. And if it works, it will serve the rest of us too. If businesses push their services towards the biological ideal, then we, the people who use those services, will end up with technology that just works better—that coders can improve more easily and more quickly than before. 

Reduce, Reuse, Repackage 

Habitat is part of a much larger effort to remake any online business in the image of Google. Alex Polvi, CEO and founder of a startup called CoreOS, calls this movement GIFEE—or Google Infrastructure For Everyone Else—and it includes tools built by CoreOS as well as such companies as Docker and Mesosphere, not to mention Google itself. The goal: to create tools that more efficiently juggle software across the vast computer networks that drive the modern digital world. 

But Jacob seeks to shift this idea’s center of gravity. He wants to make it as easy as possible for businesses to run their existing applications in this enormously distributed manner. He wants businesses embrace this ideal even if they’re not willing to rebuild these applications or the computer platforms they run on. He aims to provide a way of wrapping any code—new or old—in an interface that can run on practically any machine. Rather than rebuilding your operation in the image of Google, Jacob says, you can simply repackage it. 

“If what I want is an easier application to manage, why do I need to change the infrastructure for that application?” he says. It’s yet another extension of Alan Kay’s biological metaphor—as he himself will tell you. When I describe Habitat to Kay—now revered as one of the founding fathers of the PC, alongside so many other PARC researchers—he says it does what SmallTalk did so long go. 

Chef CTO Adam Jacob.CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED

The Unknown Programmer 

Kay traces the origins of SmallTalk to his time in the Air Force. In 1961, he was stationed at Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas, and he worked as a programmer, building software for a vacuum-tube computer called the Burroughs 220. In those days, computers didn’t have operating systems. No Apple iOS. No Windows. No Unix. And data didn’t come packaged in standard file formats. No .doc. No .xls. No .txt. But the Air Force needed a way of sending files between bases so that different machines could read them. Sometime before Kay arrived, another Air Force programmer—whose name is lost to history—cooked up a good way. 

This unnamed programmer—“almost certainly an enlisted man,” Kay says, “because officers didn’t program back then”—would put data on a magnetic-tape reel along with all the procedures needed to read that data. Then, he tacked on a simple interface—a few “pointers,” in programmer-speak—that allowed the machine to interact with those procedures. To read the data, all the machine needed to understand were the pointers—not a whole new way of doing things. In this way, someone like Kay could read the tape from any machine on any Air Force base. 

Kay’s programming objects worked in a similar way. Each did its own thing, but could communicate with the outside world through a simple interface. That meant coders could readily plug an old object into a new program, or reuse it several times across the same program. Today, this notion is fundamental to software design. And now, Habitat wants to recreate this dynamic on a higher level: not within an application, but in a way that allows an application to run across as a vast computer network. 

Because Habitat wraps an application in a package that includes everything needed to run and oversee the application—while fronting this package with a simple interface—you can potentially run that application on any machine. Or, indeed, you can spread tens, hundreds, or even thousands of packages across a vast network of machines. Software called the Habitat Supervisor sits on each machine, running each package and ensuring it can communicate with the rest. Written in a new programming language called Rust which is suited to modern online systems, Chef designed this Supervisor specifically to juggle code on an enormous scale. 

Kay's vision of code as biology is now the norm. It's how the world's programmers think about the software they build. 

But the important stuff lies inside those packages. Each package includes everything you need to orchestrate the application, as modern coders say, across myriad machines. Once you deploy your packages across a network, Jacob says, they can essentially orchestrate themselves. Instead of overseeing the application from one central nerve center, you can distribute the task—the ultimate aim of Kay’s biological system. That’s simpler and less likely to fail, at least in theory. 

What’s more, each package includes everything you need to modify the application—to, say, update the code or apply new security rules. This is what Jacob means when he says that all the automation travels with the application. “Having the management go with the package,” he says, “means I can manage in the same way, no matter where I choose to run it.” That’s vital in the modern world. Online code is constantly changing, and this system is designed for change.

‘Grownup Containers’ 

The idea at the heart of Habitat is similar to concepts that drive Mesosphere, Google’s Kubernetes, and Docker’s Swarm. All of these increasingly popular tools run software inside Linux “containers”—walled-off spaces within the Linux operating system that provide ways to orchestrate discrete pieces of code across myriad machines. Google uses containers in running its own online empire, and the rest of Silicon Valley is following suit. 

But Chef is taking a different tack. Rather than centering Habitat around Linux containers, they’ve built a new kind of package designed to run in other ways too. You can run Habitat packages atop Mesosphere or Kubernetes. You can also run them atop virtual machines, such as those offered by Amazon or Google on their cloud services. Or you can just run them on your own servers. “We can take all the existing software in the world, which wasn’t built with any of this new stuff in mind, and make it behave,” Jacob says. 

Jon Cowie, senior operations engineer at the online marketplace Etsy, is among the few outsiders who have kicked the tires on Habibat. He calls it “grownup containers.” Building an application around containers can be a complicated business, he explains. Habitat, he says, is simpler. You wrap your code, old or new, in a new interface and run it where you want to run it. “They are giving you a flexible toolkit,” he says. 

That said, container systems like Mesosphere and Kubernetes can still be a very important thing. These tools include “schedulers” that spread code across myriad machines in a hyper-efficient way, finding machines that have available resources and actually launching the code. Habitat doesn’t do that. It handles everything after the code is in place. 

Jacob sees Habitat as a tool that runs in tandem with a Mesophere or a Kubernetes—or atop other kinds of systems. He sees it as a single tool that can run any application on anything. But you may have to tweak Habitat so it will run on your infrastructure of choice. In packaging your app, Habitat must use a format that can speak to each type of system you want it to run on (the inputs and outputs for a virtual machine are different, say, from the inputs and outputs for Kubernetes), and at the moment, it only offers certain formats. If it doesn’t handle your format of choice, you’ll have to write a little extra code of your own. 

Jacob says writing this code is “trivial.” And for seasoned developers, it may be. Habitat’s overarching mission is to bring the biological imperative to as many businesses as possible. But of course, the mission isn’t everything. The importance of Habitat will really come down to how well it works.

Promise Theory 

Whatever the case, the idea behind Habitat is enormously powerful. The biological ideal has driven the evolution of computing systems for decades—and will continue to drive their evolution. Jacob and Chef are taking a concept that computer coders are intimately familiar with, and they’re applying it to something new. 

“They’re trying to take away more of the complexity—and do this in a way that matches the cultural affiliation of developers,” says Mark Burgess, a computer scientist, physicist, and philosopher whose ideas helped spawn Chef and other DevOps projects. 

Burgess compares this phenomenon to what he calls Promise Theory, where humans and autonomous agents work together to solve problems by striving to fulfill certain intentions, or promises. He sees computer automation not just as a cooperation of code, but of people and code. That’s what Jacob is striving for. You share your intentions with Habitat, and its autonomous agents work to realize them—a flesh-and-blood biological system combining with its idealized counterpart in code. 

ORIGINAL: Wired

AUTHOR: CADE METZ.CADE METZ BUSINESS 

DATE OF PUBLICATION: 06.14.16.06.14.16