Viewing profile — fhuici

FYI, a microVM isn't a small VM, nor necessarily one that has been allocated little RAM. The term comes from the fact that a microVM is launched with Firecracker (a Virtual Machine…

Current serverless offerings come with a substantial litany of complex, frustrating and expensive issues that together constitute a far cry from the promise of serverless. In this …

On kraft.cloud we use Dockeffiles to build into extremely specialized VMs for deployment. With this in place, we can have say an nginx server cold started and ready to serve at a p…

We don't need all of those layers and abstractions of course. But if we do things right we also don't need to go the bare metal server route -- cloud platforms, if done right, can …

Actually it means both, in an unfortunate case of term overload. Though I can understand the embedded/IoT world being frustrated by this, as the term existed first within that cont…

The edge within this context means running a server close, in terms of Internet latency, to users. For example, if a user if sending a request from Germany, then the response shoul…

Yes, though I'd like to point out that "scale to zero" is a loose definition to mean anything that can be transparently scaled to 0 whenever an app/service is idle, and then wake u…

100% agree. In almost all cloud deployment, whether transparently or not, you'll have a hypervisor/VM underneath for hardware-level/strong isolation reasons. Using wasm on top of t…

On kraft.cloud we can (done internal stress tests for this) run thousands of specialized VMs (aka unikernels) scaled to zero, meaning that when a request for one of them arrives we…

Hi, on kraft.cloud we use FC, along with a custom controller and very specialized VMs (unikernels) to have extremely efficient deployments (eg, millisecond cold starts). For a PHP …

Fully agree, doing reactive autoscaling when the actual boot time is slow is an inherently hard problem. We've done years of research into building specialized VMs (unikernels) and…

[Disclaimer: I'm with KraftCloud] For what it's worth, Firecracker/the VMM is only one part of the boot process. Among others, there's also the controller and the VM/OS itself that…

Author here, we did this, first by continuing the research alongside the creation of the Unikraft LF OSS project -- the result of which was the Eurosys 2021 best paper award ( http…

Hey, author/founder here, thanks for providing that answer, all correct there :) . I would also add that KraftCloud unikernels are built using Unikraft, and that its modularity all…

The 125ms is using Linux. Using a unikernel and tweaking Firecracker a bit (on KraftCloud) we can get, for example, 20 millis cold starts for NGINX, and have features on the way to…

Agree with epr's definition of a unikernel (and no, no mental decline on your part, this isn't always well defined). First off, a unikernel is a virtual machine, albeit a pretty sp…

The model of a single container within a VM just adds overhead. The ideal case would be to remove the container layer and have the application(s) within the container run directly …

[One of the authors of the paper] I wouldn't recommend writing a network stack from scratch, that is a lot of effort. Instead, with the Unikraft LF project (www.unikraft.org) we to…

[Author of the paper here] You hit the nail on the head, this is precisely what we do (kernel API compatibility) with the LF Unikraft project (the evolution of the 2017 paper) at w…

Correct, we never did release Tinyx, mostly because it was in a very unclean/researchy state = not ready for public consumption. In retrospect, we probably should have either (a) m…

Maybe try out kraft.cloud: we take Dockerfiles as input and automatically convert to lightweight VMs/unikernels when deploying (disclaimer: I'm one of the paper's authors and one o…

Yes, Kata started as clear containers. And yes, the main purpose is compatibility with containers -- though generally speaking, adding layers to the cloud stack never helps to make…

Back when we did the paper, Firecracker wasn't mainstream so we ended up doing a (much hackier) version of a fast VMM by modifying's Xen's VMM; but yeah, a few millis was totally f…

I agree with the other comments. On the cloud, the VM is still the golden standard for strong (hardware-level isolation): if you deploy a container in the cloud, you can almost be …