Firecracker MicroVMs • Hacker News Board

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#11

Post by fbleagh » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #8

Does anyone know of any good orchestrators for Firecracker VMs? While the technology is great, the CLI and API are still a bit too complex and low-level to implement some basic use cases in production.

There's a firecracker driver for Hashi's Nomad. Haven't tried that driver, but nomad isn't bad.

https://www.nomadproject.io/docs/drivers/external/firecracke...

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#12

Post by ctvo » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 7:23 PM UTC

sudhirj wrote: post #6

Best example of current usage that comes to mind (outside of AWS’s own Lambda & Fargate) is Fly.io - they they use Firecracker for all the containers.

Additionally, I remember browsing through BuildBuddy's project and saw they used it for build run isolation in their enterprise offering.

- https://www.buildbuddy.io

- https://github.com/buildbuddy-io/buildbuddy/blob/master/ente...

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#13

Post by unixhero » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 7:23 PM UTC

Aw geez. Seems like we're going to need a Firecracker awesomelist now then!

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#14

Post by imachine1980_ » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 7:25 PM UTC

what is the advantage of server-less if you have to have to manage the servers?

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#15

Post by lgierth » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

m00dy wrote: post #5

anyone knows this can create gpu-enabled microvms ?

No support for PCI devices at the moment, but I believe it's planned for some point in the future.

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#16

Post by lgierth » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

NathanKP wrote: post #10

paxys wrote: post #8

Does anyone know of any good orchestrators for Firecracker VMs? While the technology is great, the CLI and API are still a bit too complex and low-level to implement some basic use cases in production.

Take a look at Weaveworks Ignite for an open source tool for running Firecracker VMs from container images: https://github.com/weaveworks/ignite And of course AWS Fargate and Lambda use this tech under the hood transparently, so that's always an option if you don't want to host and operate it yourself.

Ignite looked intruiging when I checked it out recently - but I need to import rootfs tarballs directly, without going through any registries. Any helpful pointers are appreciated :)

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#17

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

deivid wrote: post #7

staticassertion wrote: post #2

For those using firecracker, what's your method for building a rootfs?

I build them from docker images: https://blog.davidv.dev/docker-based-images-on-baremetal.htm...

[deleted]

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#18

Post by lgierth » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 7:43 PM UTC

staticassertion wrote: post #2

For those using firecracker, what's your method for building a rootfs?

I build them using Buildah, then mkfs.ext4, mount, cp, umount. It's a little bit annoying that I'm still using root at least for the mount part.

OpenWrt's build system has a method of building rootfs ext4 and squashfs images without any root, it's somewhere in that large Makefile mess.

(sorry, reposting this as I first replied to the wrong parent)

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#19

Post by jjice » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 8:00 PM UTC

imachine1980_ wrote: post #14

what is the advantage of server-less if you have to have to manage the servers?

This is more meant for providers. Best example being AWS's serverless offerings, as well as fly.io.

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#20

Post by staticassertion » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 8:01 PM UTC

imachine1980_ wrote: post #14

what is the advantage of server-less if you have to have to manage the servers?

If you're hosting someone else's code.