The information jobs for the remainder of the 21st century will not be managed by operating systems. Today, we perceive Twitter as one of a very few examples of services that run at “Internet scale” — at a scale so large that the size of its domain is meaningless. Yet Twitter is actually an example of what one day, within most of our lifetimes, will be considered an everyday job, the sort of thing you expect networks of clustered servers numbering in the tens of thousands to do.
Twitter is building a service automation platform called Aurora. It isn’t done; its current version number is 0.7. It is a job control system of sorts, but rather than controlling the server that runs the job — as operating systems used to do back when they were in command of the data center — it controls the job that indentures the servers.
But unlike the premier “Internet-scale” service Google, Twitter is building Aurora in the open.
