Zerg: Boot a VM instance per request, all in under 250 ms

Re:Zerg: Boot a VM instance per request, all in under 250 ms by rwmj on Thursday December 28, 2017 @05:57AM (#16021393)

I couldn't get to the site, but assuming this is running Linux I wrote a paper about how fast you could boot a Linux minimal userspace on QEMU a couple of years ago[1]. In short if you're willing to heavily customize the kernel, qemu and userspace then you can get it down to 100-150ms on i7-type hardware, but probably not much lower. Using a distro kernel, distro qemu and so on, you're stuck with 400-600ms (which is fine for certain uses, eg better security for containers like Kata Containers is doing).

Also worth noting I wrote a bunch of benchmarking tools to help optimize this case[2].

[1] http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/paper.pdf

[2] https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/tree/master/utils

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Re:Zerg: Boot a VM instance per request, all in under 250 ms by vidarh on Sunday December 31, 2017 @01:02AM (#16039579)

Thanks for the links. I've looked at Clear Containers/Hyper/Kata before, and it's absolutely looking good. It's very interesting to see your work on going into details on it, though.

I really hope this can be pushed further down to the point where it gets viable to for more use cases. Of course, we can always use something lighter than Linux, but being able to start with Linux and pare down is potentially so much easier for many types of applications.

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