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A comment on Zerg: Boot a VM instance per request, all in under 250 ms. Parent comment

Re:Zerg: Boot a VM instance per request, all in under 250 ms by rdtsc on Thursday December 28, 2017 @01:18AM (#16020655)
It's an implementation of the Erlang VM on top of Xen. Xen is a virtualization hypervisor. Erlang VM is a virtual machine which runs Erlang bytecode. The default implementation is called BEAM and it runs on *nix, Windows and other architectures. This implementation is more lightweight and only runs on top of Xen. One of its main features is a fast boot time.

So to recap instead of the typical stack of:

    Erlang Code | BEAM VM | Linux or other OS | VM or Hardware
You get:

    Erlang Code | Ling | Xen | Hardware
The use cases could be isolation, scaling or what authors calls 0-footprint cloud. That is, only spawn instances as you process requests. When requests are not coming, you don't have any instances running. In more modern terms maybe it could be used for building a serverless architecture used to run cloud "functions"

Yes there is obvious irony here with the demo not handling requests well after the HN frontage hug of death, but I think it is still a beta / experimental product, it has been around for a good number of years and is somewhat abandoned. If anyone knows more please feel free to correct me.

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Re:Zerg: Boot a VM instance per request, all in under 250 ms by dmytrish on Thursday December 28, 2017 @11:06AM (#16022793)
Actually, we had a POSIX port of Ling of alpha quality (e.g. no access to file system, a prototype of network connections based on libuv, etc) and experimented with running it on MIPS microcontrollers natively (not a great idea due to memory constraints and lack of drivers, but it could do simple computations).
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Re:Zerg: Boot a VM instance per request, all in under 250 ms by djhworld on Thursday December 28, 2017 @04:17AM (#16021098)
I enjoyed your post, it made me think, could you do something similar with say the JVM?

I know loading JVM based applications have horrific startup times on cold boot, but I was just wondering could you run the JVM directly on top of Xen?

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Re:Zerg: Boot a VM instance per request, all in under 250 ms by RainaRelanah on Thursday December 28, 2017 @05:09AM (#16021245)
You might want to look at OSv[0], an extremely lightweight OS for running a singular JVM process on cloud vms. There's a decent list of unikernels (including OSv and LING) here[1].

0. http://osv.io/ 1. http://unikernel.org/projects/

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Re:Zerg: Boot a VM instance per request, all in under 250 ms by kasey_junk on Thursday December 28, 2017 @05:11AM (#16021254)
https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv/wiki
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Re:Zerg: Boot a VM instance per request, all in under 250 ms by murukesh_s on Thursday December 28, 2017 @05:49AM (#16021367)
OK, thanks, I think it's a great idea, especially if it can run other runtimes like Node.js or JVM
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