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Firecracker – Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Firecracker – Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing

#11

Post by xmly »

discodave wrote: post #8
sudhirj wrote: post #3

What this is allows, and I'm hoping a full fledged service will be announced on Thursday or Friday, is running containers as Lambdas. i.e. if you application starts fast enough, you can just set a container to start and run as a request comes in. It can also shut down when it's done running. This allows things like per second billing for container runs, serverless containers (there's no container running 24/7, only w…

> containers as Lambdas. How similar is AWS Fargate to what you're describing?

Pricing model is not serverless. The basic serverless principle is no-use-no-pay.

Re: Firecracker – Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing

#12

Post by talawahtech »

This is huge! It basically removes the VM as the security boundary for something like Fargate [1]. This should lead to a significant reduction in pricing since Fargate will no longer need to over provision in the background because VMs were being used even for tiny Fargate launch types.

It should hopefully eliminate the cost disparity between using Fargate vs running your own instances. Should also mean much faster scale out since you containers don't need to wait on an entire VM to boot!

Will be interesting to see what kind of collaboration they get on the project. This is a big test of AWS stewardship of an open source project. It seems to be competing directly with Kata Containers [2] so it will be interesting to see which solution is deemed technically superior.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/ [2] https://katacontainers.io/

Re: Firecracker – Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing

#14

Post by talawahtech »

xmly wrote: post #11
discodave wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> containers as Lambdas. How similar is AWS Fargate to what you're describing?

Pricing model is not serverless. The basic serverless principle is no-use-no-pay.

Theoretically, if container start up times are around 125ms it should be possible to achieve this with Fargate + Knative's "scale to zero" functionality[1]. AWS is already working on improving Fargate/Kubernetes integration.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/knative/

Re: Firecracker – Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing

#15

Post by colemickens »

The crosvm and Rust have me intrigued. I was hoping for something like this since I saw the first hints of Rust showing up in ChromeOS in crosvm.

A compare/contrast with Kata Containers would also be interesting. Their architectures look similar. (Kata Containers [1] being another solution for running containers in KVM-isolated VMs, that has working integrations with Kubernetes and containerd already. Not affiliated, but I'm tinkering with it in a current project, though I'm also now keen to get `firecracker` working as well.)

Obviously, if nothing else, qemu vs crosvm is a big difference, and probably significant since my understanding is that Google chose to also eschew using qemu for Google Cloud.

[1]: https://katacontainers.io/

Re: Firecracker – Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing

#16

Post by sudhirj »

discodave wrote: post #8
sudhirj wrote: post #3

What this is allows, and I'm hoping a full fledged service will be announced on Thursday or Friday, is running containers as Lambdas. i.e. if you application starts fast enough, you can just set a container to start and run as a request comes in. It can also shut down when it's done running. This allows things like per second billing for container runs, serverless containers (there's no container running 24/7, only w…

> containers as Lambdas. How similar is AWS Fargate to what you're describing?

I need to run 1+ Fargate containers 24/7, which is useless and wasteful.

With Fargate-Lambda crossover I wouldn't be running anything 24/7, and it would be a lot less resource intensive than one Lambda-Container per request as well.

Google's App Engine gets / got this right when they first launched, but to make it work they had to demand apps be written for their sandbox (like AWS Lambda), because of which the model isn't as general purpose. Firecracker would allow regular containers to be used this way, making a Firecracker service the first service to allow general purpose servers to be started and stopped (all the way to zero) based on incoming traffic.

Re: Firecracker – Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing

#17

Post by sudhirj »

Tehnix wrote: post #4

I really hope this helps with the cold start times on Lambda. We were currently looking heavily into moving our API from Lambda to EKS, but if this impacts cold start times, I think we will look at how it ends up looking like in practice.

Most code start time problems on Lambda I've seen are VPC related - public network Lambdas start in milliseconds, with the main lag being the userspace code startup time.

Starting a Lambda inside a VPC involves attaching a high security network adapter individually to each running process, which is likely what takes so long. I assume AWS is working on that, though, they've claimed some speedups unofficially.

If your security model allows, try running your Lambdas off-VPC.

Re: Firecracker – Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing

#19

Post by aliguori »

colemickens wrote: post #15

The crosvm and Rust have me intrigued. I was hoping for something like this since I saw the first hints of Rust showing up in ChromeOS in crosvm. A compare/contrast with Kata Containers would also be interesting. Their architectures look similar. (Kata Containers [1] being another solution for running containers in KVM-isolated VMs, that has working integrations with Kubernetes and containerd already. Not affiliated,…

Kata Containers is a lot of infrastructure for running containers and it uses QEMU to run the actual VMs. Firecracker just replaces the QEMU part and we're eager to work with folks like the Kata community.

I love QEMU, it's an amazing project, but it does a ton and it's very oriented towards running disk images and full operating systems. We wanted to explore something really focused on serverless. So far, I'm really happy with the results and I hope others find it interesting too.

Re: Firecracker – Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing

#20

Post by tybit »

discodave wrote: post #8
sudhirj wrote: post #3

What this is allows, and I'm hoping a full fledged service will be announced on Thursday or Friday, is running containers as Lambdas. i.e. if you application starts fast enough, you can just set a container to start and run as a request comes in. It can also shut down when it's done running. This allows things like per second billing for container runs, serverless containers (there's no container running 24/7, only w…

> containers as Lambdas. How similar is AWS Fargate to what you're describing?

Another missing piece in addition to the billing aspect mentioned elsewhere, is all the existing event based integrations lambda provides. E.g. react to kinesis, sqs, sns etc. events. having aws manage the event plumbing in addition to start/pause/stop is really nice.
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