What really surprised me the most, is how quick and simple it is to compile the linux kernel. Cloned a tag with --depth 1, configured it and then it took ~ 5 minutes to build vmlinuz.bin. As someone who is too young to have had to regularly do that, I had heard multiple stories of how long that's supposed to take but it really doesn't.
I then tried to move from firecracker to qemu microvms but didn't get that far yet since I didn't have more time.
All in all a great learning experience and if I wasn't an undergrad student with no time, I'd love to build a service/business around it.
It used to, but that's why they are only stories now.
I came across Unikraft a while ago and went “wow that’s cool, but I have no idea how to use this”, cloud offering and docs you have up there now look amazing! Will 100% be giving this a go first thing tomorrow!!
Kraft Cloud: takes your docker image, and turns it into a “unikernel”, and runs that. In a unikernel, your application _is_ the kernel. There’s no process boundary, no kernel-space/userspace split there’s a single address-space etc.
I believe the idea is that you get a perf benefit-as your application is often the only one running in the container, security is provided by the hupervisor anyways, so may as well cut out all the middle layers that aren’t getting you much. Seems some of the authors/founders of Unikraft are in the comments, they can explain much better than I.
Finally, we also had to design and implement a controller from scratch -- nothing out there provided the millisecond semantics and scalability we needed (plus we also did tweaks to network interface creation and a few other things to get the end to end experience to be fast).
My work had a product that was doing builds and hosting for arbitrary client code, you’re doing all that, plus more. I’ve got massive respect for that, because there were some hard problems to solve, even in our pretty vanilla environment- looks like you guys have done a far better job than we did, plus more!
Commercially, we leverage Unikraft on kraft.cloud to provide a cloud platform with millisecond semantics.
The first step should be to not be so entirely reliant on Docker.
As much as I'd love to try this lightweight VM idea, I don't have the time or energy to convert 20+ projects I'm self-hosting into this and then keep everything updated. I'd rather invest this time into learning Docker more and making my existing setup more secure and robust.