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Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines

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Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines

#151

Post by naikrovek »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #143
naikrovek wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comp-sci people like repeatability when they want that and true randomness when that is desired. Things in between are rarely desired. In computing, things are much more useful when they behave in predictable ways. Even AI, many (most?) would argue.

Computer science and software development are hardly related

You are wrong. You may think that they aren’t related because you write software without thinking about computer science, but that says more about you and modern software development seat-filling than it does anything else.

One can’t write anything efficient without comp-sci being forefront in your mind the entire time you are writing. Which explains exactly why everything is so slow today.

If you’re not thinking about what is computable, what is not computable, and what is easily computable as you think about the problems you are trying to solve, you are a professional novice.

Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines

#152

Post by weird-eye-issue »

naikrovek wrote: post #151
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer science and software development are hardly related

You are wrong. You may think that they aren’t related because you write software without thinking about computer science, but that says more about you and modern software development seat-filling than it does anything else. One can’t write anything efficient without comp-sci being forefront in your mind the entire time you are writing. Which explains exactly why everything is so slow today. If you’re not thinking abo…

I studied computer science at one of the top colleges. It's true there's a lot of overlap between the two. But they are still very different fields.

You definitely don't need to study computer science just to avoid making common performance issues and in fact just studying computer science doesn't mean that you aren't going to introduce things like N+1 query issues, that's sort of thing comes from experience more than anything.

Likewise, just studying computer science does not mean that you are going to be well suited for software development in the real world.

> If you’re not thinking about what is computable, what is not computable, and what is easily computable as you think about the problems you are trying to solve, you are a professional novice.

Of course I consider all of these things but that didn't come from studying computer science in college lol.

Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines

#154

Post by sureglymop »

binsquare wrote: post #88
sureglymop wrote: post #75

What I really like about containers is quickly being able to spin one up without having to specify resources (e.g. RAM limit). I hope this would let me do that also.

This does that. I'm trying to do away the model of cpu and memory tbh. Virtio- balloon dynamically resizes based on memory consumed. CPU is oversubscribed by default

Sounds amazing! I hope it can replace "docker run --rm" for me. Nice work!

Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines

#155

Post by fqiao »

gigatexal wrote: post #136

im keen to check this out. since I've moved 100% to the Mac [1] I've been keen to move away from Docker to something like Apple Containers [2] which runs each "container" as an isolated vm. So I wanna try this out, too. [1] shameful self plug: https://gigatexal.blog/pages/i-heart-my-macbook/i-heart-my-m... [2] https://github.com/apple/container

Let us know your thoughts! Thanks

Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines

#156

Post by fqiao »

jaytheseveloper wrote: post #144
PufPufPuf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey this is super cool. I've been researching tech like this for my AI sandboxing solution, ended up with Lima+Incus: https://github.com/JanPokorny/locki My problem with microVMs was that they usually won't run docker / kubernetes, I work on apps that consist of whole kubernetes clusters and want the sandbox to contain all that. Does your solution support running k3s for example?

Curious what prevented you from running docker in a microvm? I've successfully run docker in qemu and firecracker microvms.

So we originally just wanted the vm to be light-weight and can start fast, so we removed docker. @binsquare has a change later to add docker back.

Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines

#158

Post by PufPufPuf »

jaytheseveloper wrote: post #144
PufPufPuf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey this is super cool. I've been researching tech like this for my AI sandboxing solution, ended up with Lima+Incus: https://github.com/JanPokorny/locki My problem with microVMs was that they usually won't run docker / kubernetes, I work on apps that consist of whole kubernetes clusters and want the sandbox to contain all that. Does your solution support running k3s for example?

Curious what prevented you from running docker in a microvm? I've successfully run docker in qemu and firecracker microvms.

I've been experimenting with krunvm and there the init system is weird. Didn't evaluate firecracker since it doesn't support macOS hosts.

Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines

#159

Post by PufPufPuf »

mkagenius wrote: post #105
PufPufPuf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey this is super cool. I've been researching tech like this for my AI sandboxing solution, ended up with Lima+Incus: https://github.com/JanPokorny/locki My problem with microVMs was that they usually won't run docker / kubernetes, I work on apps that consist of whole kubernetes clusters and want the sandbox to contain all that. Does your solution support running k3s for example?

With instavm ( https://instavm.io ), you can provide an OCI image built from a dockerfile.

That's not the same as running the docker daemon in the sandbox.

Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines

#160

Post by messh »

tomComb wrote: post #73
messh wrote: post #35

https://shellbox.dev is a hosted version of something very similar

This sounds great, except for one thing: you can scale your compute (CPU & RAM) as needed but your storage appears to scale with it. So, if I use a "16 vCPUs, 32GB RAM, 400GB SSD" machine for a period of intense compute, and then want to scale that down to "2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM", most of my storage disappears? That rather ruins the potential of the advertised scalability.

The scalability is in the number of instances: create, duplicate and destroy down to zero. Each instance size is fixed.
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