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My VM is lighter (and safer) than your container (2017)
21–30 of 111 posts
Re: My VM is lighter (and safer) than your container (2017)
#22This paper references consistently mischaracterizes AWS Lambda as a "Container as a Service" technology, when in fact it is exactly the sort of lightweight VM that they are describing - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...
In fairness to this paper, it was written and published before that Firecracker article (2017 vs 2018). From another paper on Firecracker providing a bit of history: > When we first built AWS Lambda, we chose to use Linux containers to isolate functions, and virtualization to isolate between customer accounts. In other words, multiple functions for the same customer would run inside a single VM, but workloads for dif…
Thank you for this detail!
Re: My VM is lighter (and safer) than your container (2017)
#23This paper references consistently mischaracterizes AWS Lambda as a "Container as a Service" technology, when in fact it is exactly the sort of lightweight VM that they are describing - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...
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Re: My VM is lighter (and safer) than your container (2017)
#24How does LightVM compare to Firecracker VMs? Could it be used for on-demand cloud VMs?
Re: My VM is lighter (and safer) than your container (2017)
#25Title is kinda clickbaity (wha-? how can a VM be lighter than a container). It's about unikernels.
> how can a VM be lighter than a container
It's still clickbaity, but the title implies a comparison between a very lightweight VM and a heavy-weight container (presumably a container based on a full Linux distro). You could imagine an analogous article about a tiny house titled "my house is smaller than your apartment".
Re: My VM is lighter (and safer) than your container (2017)
#26Title is kinda clickbaity (wha-? how can a VM be lighter than a container). It's about unikernels.
Firecracker VMs are considered lighter than a container and are pretty old at this point.
Re: My VM is lighter (and safer) than your container (2017)
#27Kubernetes says no... The article is light on detail. Containers and VMs have different use cases. If you self host lightweight VMs is likely the better path, however, once you in the cloud most managed services only provide support for containers.
> in the cloud most managed services only provide support for containers.
Respectfully, comments like these are the reason for Kubernetes becoming a meme.
Re: My VM is lighter (and safer) than your container (2017)
#28I'm quite interested in seeing where slim VM's go. Personally I don't use Kubernetes, it just doesn't fit my client work which is nearly all single-server and it makes more sense to just run podman systemd units or docker-compose setups. So from that perspective, when I've peeked at firecracker, kata containers, etc, the "small dev dx" isn't quite there yet, or maybe never will get there since the players target othe…
They went to trash because containers are more convenient to use and saving few MBs of disk/memory is not what most users care.
The whole idea was pretty much either use custom kernel (which inevitably have way less info on how to debug anything in it), and re-do all of the network and storage plumbing containers already do via the OS they are running one.
OR just very slim linux one which at least people know how to use but STILL is more complexity than "just a blob with some namespaces in it" and STILL requires a bunch of config and data juggling between hypervisor and VM just to share some host files to the guest.
Either way to get to the level of "just a slim layer of code between hypervisor and your code" you need to do a quite a lot of deep plumbing and when anything goes wrong debugging is harder. All to get some perceived security and no better performance than just... running the binary in a container.
It did percolate into "slim containers" idea where the container is just statically compiled binary + few configs and while it does have same problems with debuggability, you can just attach sidecart to it
I guess next big hype will be "VM bUt YoU RuN WebAsSeMbLy In CuStOm KeRnEl"
Re: My VM is lighter (and safer) than your container (2017)
#29Title is kinda clickbaity (wha-? how can a VM be lighter than a container). It's about unikernels.
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Re: My VM is lighter (and safer) than your container (2017)
#30This paper references consistently mischaracterizes AWS Lambda as a "Container as a Service" technology, when in fact it is exactly the sort of lightweight VM that they are describing - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...
AWS "just" runs linux but this is using unikernels tho ?