Link to this cool blog post

_posts/2023-02-03-scheduling-the-work.md

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "Scheduling work with market dynamics"
+tags:
+- otto
+- software
+---
+
+I had a lucky break in the day and was able to read [this blog
+post](https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchestrator/) which popped up in my social feed. In essence it talks about what Fly.io did to rebuild
+their scheduler to better match what they're trying to accomplish.
+Orchestration and scheduling are topics I like to geek out on, going back many
+years as part of the [Jenkins project](https://jenkins.io). But this quote in
+particular caught my eye:
+
+> `flyd` has a radically different model from Kubernetes and Nomad. Mainstream
+> orchestrators are like sophisticated memory allocators, operating from a
+> reliable global picture of all capacity everywhere in the cluster. Not `flyd`.
+>
+> Instead, `flyd` operates like a market. Requests to schedule jobs are bids for
+> resources; workers are suppliers. Our orchestrator sits in the middle like an
+> exchange. ratemysandwich.com asks for a Fly Machine with 4 dedicated CPU cores
+> in Chennai (sandwich: bun kebab?). Some worker in MAA offers room; a match is
+> made, the order is filled.
+
+
+I _love_ this idea for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that it's a
+real-world incantation of an unoriginal idea that I had for
+[Otto](https://github.com/rtyler/otto), an overly ambitious CI/CD side-project.
+
+In my work I referred to it as [resource allocation by
+auction](https://github.com/rtyler/otto/blob/main/rfc/0003-resource-auctioning.adoc)
+and had only just begun to experiment with the concept. I once read a computer
+science paper which described this concept more in detail, but I cannot seem to
+find it again.
+
+Suffice it to say, there's a lot of good efficiency to be gained by resource
+auctioning in this manner, especially in a multi-tenant system. The Fly.io blog
+post is an interesting read either way, but efficient resource scheduling in
+this way I hope makes it into a _lot_ of other systems.