ZeroVM: lightweight containers based on Google Native Client
1–10 of 79 posts
Re: ZeroVM: lightweight containers based on Google Native Client
#2I'm slightly confused as to if this has any use beyond "on-demand data access" use cases. I reviewed the site and I like the idea but I'm confused as to what else this could be used for. Would something like a "Heroku" style PaaS using PyPy or something that targets NaCL benefit from this is a process separation sense? Anybody care to clarify?
Re: ZeroVM: lightweight containers based on Google Native Client
#3how is it different from freebsd jails or containers in linux?
Re: ZeroVM: lightweight containers based on Google Native Client
#4I have never read so many words and understood so little about a technology before. The density of marketing-speak per word is approximately 1.
Why can't some people just explain things simply?
Re: ZeroVM: lightweight containers based on Google Native Client
#5I have never read so many words and understood so little about a technology before. The density of marketing-speak per word is approximately 1. Why can't some people just explain things simply?
I read it the other way around:
the prose is poor - perhaps not written by a native English speaker - but its very technical, accurate and not BS
Re: ZeroVM: lightweight containers based on Google Native Client
#6Perhaps the "motivation" section would serve as a better landing page.
What's the current state of security with LXC? As I recall, Heroku relies on this for it's virtualization.
Re: ZeroVM: lightweight containers based on Google Native Client
#7I will try and explain it as I understand it:
Google Chrome has a sandboxed VM called Native Client (NaCl) that runs at near full speed. Its very neat.
So they have taken that same VM and, instead of Chrome's Pepper API, they have a file-handle-based API and some message-passing between instances.
Now you can compile your C/C++/whatever program and run it on the cloud!
It seems an excellent building-block for big data and big crunching on the cloud, and it gets the benefit of Google's massive resources on security and performance fixes.
Re: ZeroVM: lightweight containers based on Google Native Client
#8I read this as RPC with code instead of just data. If so, this is exactly what I've been looking for a long time, because traditional RPC roundtrip latency is often high - so high, that you need to create a more complicated API to avoid excess iteration.
Combine this with ZeroMQ and MessagePack, and you have some serious power at your fingertips.
Messages can execute at destination, do iteration, API calls and return only needed part of the data and results back.
Re: ZeroVM: lightweight containers based on Google Native Client
#9I have never read so many words and understood so little about a technology before. The density of marketing-speak per word is approximately 1. Why can't some people just explain things simply?
From what I read it's something like this:
It gives a bare-bones environment for you to run your programs that is presumably very low overhead. Think of it as an embedded system where programs run without an OS. This is the environment a program running inside zerovm will see. All you have is libc and the zerovm-provided APIs. If you want more, you'll have to statically link your programs.
The thing is, you can run many, lets say thousands, of these little programs inside a single machine in such a way that each one can never see the other ones (as long as it's impossible to break out of the ZeroVM sandbox).
Such a technology would enable neat stuff, like renting a server for someone to run a single program for some period of time and have the results sent back. Nobody does this for unrestricted programs today, for many reasons, a very important one being the fact that it would be very hard to do this in a secure way.
The "run a C program for some period of time thing" would work kind of like the AWS dashboard, but instead of having to spin up a machine with linux on it and running your program inside that, you would only upload your binary and a manifest file. Kind of like what app engine does, but with less restrictions (you'll probably be able to do anything as long as you're able to compile a "safe" binary that does it).
Re: ZeroVM: lightweight containers based on Google Native Client
#10Very cool, I've been waiting for this to happen.
I'm surprised that Google doesn't explicitly talk more about this use case for Native Client. It could be the backbone for an AWS/Heroku competitor. The ability to run lightweight tasklets securely would enable a lot of interesting scenarios. While not very significant, Google actually already started doing this with their Exacycle program: