Article for Data Center Knowledge by Jack Vaughn
The endlessly running program, of course, predates the cloud. It dates to mainframes and persisted through client/server and virtual machines. A tried-and-true operating model was to “pull the plug and wait for somebody to scream,” said Eric Newcomer, analyst at Intellyx and a veteran of middleware and distributed computing.
Cloud computing pioneered the use of commodity hardware, massive scale, aggressive replication, and container orchestration tools like Kubernetes. But these innovations don’t easily map to today’s LLMs and agentic AI. The GPU-based hardware behind modern AI is far different from the commodity setups built for cloud-style distributed computing – and AI zombies cost more, in both money and electricity.
Newcomer noted that, under the auspices of the Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Kubernetes is evolving to better support AI workloads, where new kinds of zombies emerge. Kubernetes innovations are spreading across new AI-focused cloud providers, but much of this work is still in its early stages.
Image credit Craiyon, https://www.craiyon.com
Click here to read the article
Click here to read the article in Chinese
