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Launch HN: Nestybox (YC S20) – Containers beyond microservices

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Re: Launch HN: Nestybox (YC S20) – Containers beyond microservices

#31

Post by bfirsh »

Ex-Docker person here. I got an early peek at Sysbox and I'm really excited by it -- it's really neat.

Docker is missing a bunch of features that make some software work, which is why you can't run Docker inside Docker by default. Instead of dropping from containers all the way down to hardware virtualization, Sysbox is "augmenting" containers with the missing features by simulating them in userland. That gives you all the power of a VM, without any of the downside of slow start-up speed, provisioning blocks of memory, not being able to run them on EC2, etcetc.

It reminds me a bit of user-mode Linux [0], weirdly. There's something kinda interesting about simulating a bunch of the kernel in userland.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-mode_Linux

Re: Launch HN: Nestybox (YC S20) – Containers beyond microservices

#32

Post by jpetrucc »

ctalledo wrote: post #29
jpetrucc wrote: post #27

Congrats on the launch - looks very interesting! Are there any performance implications using this custom runtime? Have you used this in production systems? Are there any known limitations of using sysbox?

Thanks! Performance wise, we've not noticed any reduction in performance compared to a regular container, mainly because Sysbox sits on some control-path operations (e.g., accesses to /proc/sys, mount syscall, etc) but is really not intercepting anything on the datapath. For example, deploying K8s inside a system container takes As far as using this in production, the software is well tested but has not been used in…

Thanks for the response - looking forward to trying it out this weekend!

Re: Launch HN: Nestybox (YC S20) – Containers beyond microservices

#33

Post by jpetrucc »

rmolina wrote: post #30
jpetrucc wrote: post #27

Congrats on the launch - looks very interesting! Are there any performance implications using this custom runtime? Have you used this in production systems? Are there any known limitations of using sysbox?

Thanks! We are out of the critical path, meaning we only emulate interactions with procfs / sysfs, and we only intercept mount syscalls at the moment, so we don't see any tangible performance hit. Having said that, we haven't done large scaling&perf tests yet.

Ah okay cool, makes sense.

Thanks for the response!

Re: Launch HN: Nestybox (YC S20) – Containers beyond microservices

#36

Post by ctalledo »

bfirsh wrote: post #31

Ex-Docker person here. I got an early peek at Sysbox and I'm really excited by it -- it's really neat. Docker is missing a bunch of features that make some software work, which is why you can't run Docker inside Docker by default. Instead of dropping from containers all the way down to hardware virtualization, Sysbox is "augmenting" containers with the missing features by simulating them in userland. That gives you a…

Thanks! Yes, Sysbox is using OS-virtualization techniques to augment the abstraction of the container, thereby enabling software that interacts deeply with the kernel (e.g., dockerd, k8s, etc) to run inside the container, and do so with proper isolation (no privileged containers). Now that you mention user-mode linux, it is one of the references we used as we built Sysbox, though they are very different things of course. I think my background as a VMware ESX kernel developer played a strong influence too ...

Re: Launch HN: Nestybox (YC S20) – Containers beyond microservices

#38

Post by swsieber »

ctalledo wrote: post #36
bfirsh wrote: post #31

Ex-Docker person here. I got an early peek at Sysbox and I'm really excited by it -- it's really neat. Docker is missing a bunch of features that make some software work, which is why you can't run Docker inside Docker by default. Instead of dropping from containers all the way down to hardware virtualization, Sysbox is "augmenting" containers with the missing features by simulating them in userland. That gives you a…

Thanks! Yes, Sysbox is using OS-virtualization techniques to augment the abstraction of the container, thereby enabling software that interacts deeply with the kernel (e.g., dockerd, k8s, etc) to run inside the container, and do so with proper isolation (no privileged containers). Now that you mention user-mode linux, it is one of the references we used as we built Sysbox, though they are very different things of cou…

So can you run sysbox in sysbox?

Re: Launch HN: Nestybox (YC S20) – Containers beyond microservices

#39

Post by ctalledo »

omginternets wrote: post #37

How can I use this to start a system container on e.g. AWS?

You can certainly install Sysbox on an AWS EC2 VM and launch system containers inside that VM.

Note that Sysbox currently requires Ubuntu Linux, because the latest Ubuntu releases use pretty new kernels and carry kernel patches that Sysbox relies on in order to perform some of the OS-virtualization in userland. See this doc for the distros supported by Sysbox:

https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox/blob/master/docs/distro-c...

We are actively working on adding support for more distros.

Re: Launch HN: Nestybox (YC S20) – Containers beyond microservices

#40

Post by asadlionpk »

rmolina wrote: post #26
sanketdasgupta wrote: post #25

This is completely off-topic, but why use a Github user like an organization?

Sorry, not sure i got that. Can you please elaborate?

I think they mean: why is https://github.com/nestybox a user instead of an org account?
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