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Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on Xen

zerg.erlangonxen.org

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Re: Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on Xen

#31

Post by viktorsovietov »

zobzu wrote: post #27

few questions: "how do get logs of everyone accessing the server?" "how do you debug the server itself when it fails?" "how do you audit the server if an attacker actually breaks in?" it seems to me that the app has to implement all that as with an exokernel, except, there's a single process running, yours To my understanding: compared to traditional vms, what you gain is speed and simplicity. compared to jails and c…

every instance can export its monitoring information as 9p virtual filesystem, which easily can be mounted from outside

we debug server code in BEAM, Erlang on Xen is a deployment platform, if instance crashed we simply restart it.

intruder has very few chances to find breaking in beneficial - there's no shell inside which gives only minimal chances to snatch control, instance simply will crash. also, having of no OS leaves no holes to dig deeper

You're correct, it's exokernel-like approach.

We gain simplicity, much better resource consumption characteristrics, manageability at large scale and much better instance mobility. And, well, security.

Re: Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on Xen

#32

Post by [deleted] »

pjmlp wrote: post #15
jared314 wrote: post #7

It sounds like they exchanged one container, an OS managed process, for another one.

The idea behind this systems is that there is no operating system any longer. The programming language runtime is mapped to execute directly on top of the hypervisor. There are already such systems for Erlang, OCaml, Haskell and Java runtimes. If the programming language has a good library, there is no need for an operating system, the hardware access can be taken care by the hypervisor. This leads to safer and faste…

[deleted]

Re: Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on Xen

#33

Post by smosher »

arb99 wrote: post #29
smosher wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing it out, I gave me an excuse to look at the numbers: I took 4.6 seconds when I loaded it. In the breakdown ~4.3s of that was nginx dicking around (probably spending much of its time telling people it can't spawn an instance right now.) The lightweight nature of the page is obviously exposing the nginx overhead, which is turning out to be a bottleneck. Based on all that: with more complex pages, a m…

fair enough. was just pointing it out as it is presented as if it is fast for a page load time. neat project though.

It is a good point, when the load time is measured in seconds it doesn't leave one with the impression that it's fast. It would be better to see it serving with a more realistic configuration.

Re: Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on Xen

#34

Post by p9idf »

viktorsovietov wrote: post #31
zobzu wrote: post #27

few questions: "how do get logs of everyone accessing the server?" "how do you debug the server itself when it fails?" "how do you audit the server if an attacker actually breaks in?" it seems to me that the app has to implement all that as with an exokernel, except, there's a single process running, yours To my understanding: compared to traditional vms, what you gain is speed and simplicity. compared to jails and c…

every instance can export its monitoring information as 9p virtual filesystem, which easily can be mounted from outside we debug server code in BEAM, Erlang on Xen is a deployment platform, if instance crashed we simply restart it. intruder has very few chances to find breaking in beneficial - there's no shell inside which gives only minimal chances to snatch control, instance simply will crash. also, having of no OS…

>every instance can export its monitoring information as 9p virtual filesystem

How do you handle authentication?

Re: Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on Xen

#35

Post by mercurial »

jacques_chester wrote: post #2

Nifty. I postulated a while back that the virtual machine would eventually be the target of web application design[1]. I wrote an honours project proposal for a blog engine based on reckoning that if you can control a (virtual) machine from the bottom up, why stay trapped in the architectural constraints of shared hosting? At the time I referred to the Mirage project, which was an OCaml runtime ported to sit directly…

HalVM looks dead, judging by the age of the last commits, but Mirage seems alive and well.

Re: Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on Xen

#36

Post by viktorsovietov »

p9idf wrote: post #34
viktorsovietov wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

every instance can export its monitoring information as 9p virtual filesystem, which easily can be mounted from outside we debug server code in BEAM, Erlang on Xen is a deployment platform, if instance crashed we simply restart it. intruder has very few chances to find breaking in beneficial - there's no shell inside which gives only minimal chances to snatch control, instance simply will crash. also, having of no OS…

>every instance can export its monitoring information as 9p virtual filesystem How do you handle authentication?

right now it looks like http://erlangonxen.org/more/mumble

Re: Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on Xen

#37

Post by dons »

mercurial wrote: post #35
jacques_chester wrote: post #2

Nifty. I postulated a while back that the virtual machine would eventually be the target of web application design[1]. I wrote an honours project proposal for a blog engine based on reckoning that if you can control a (virtual) machine from the bottom up, why stay trapped in the architectural constraints of shared hosting? At the time I referred to the Mirage project, which was an OCaml runtime ported to sit directly…

HalVM looks dead, judging by the age of the last commits, but Mirage seems alive and well.

Not dead. Here's Adam's talk from the Xen Summit 6 months ago - http://www.xen.org/xensummit/xs12na_talks/M9b.html

Re: Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on Xen

#38

Post by dons »

jlouis wrote: post #19
arb99 wrote: post #3

" 0.6 sec ago is when we received your request. Within this time we managed to create a new Xen instance, boot it, and run the application that rendered the page you are viewing. By the time you are done reading this, the instance will be gone. " for a basic page like that is a bit slow...

True, but the Erlang VM is not really written for fast startup. Module loading is serial and not parallel. The key here is that you can scale up in 0.6 seconds, which is awfully much faster than most other solutions, where scaling takes minutes.

While halvm boots in the 10ms range (like starting a GHC process). These can be very fine grained and fast.

Re: Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on Xen

#39

Post by viktorsovietov »

dons wrote: post #37
mercurial wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HalVM looks dead, judging by the age of the last commits, but Mirage seems alive and well.

Not dead. Here's Adam's talk from the Xen Summit 6 months ago - http://www.xen.org/xensummit/xs12na_talks/M9b.html

Thanks, I'm glad to hear that!

Re: Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on Xen

#40

Post by mercurial »

dons wrote: post #37
mercurial wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HalVM looks dead, judging by the age of the last commits, but Mirage seems alive and well.

Not dead. Here's Adam's talk from the Xen Summit 6 months ago - http://www.xen.org/xensummit/xs12na_talks/M9b.html

I'll have a look. When I first heard of it (last year?) I thought it was brilliant.
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