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Firecracker MicroVMs

firecracker-microvm.github.io

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Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#41

Post by jsolson »

cutemonster wrote: post #39
andrewstuart wrote: post #29

Note that this Amazon developed technology does not work on Amazon Web Services instances. It does however work on Google, Azure and Digital Ocean instances where you can configure nested virtualisation.

> does not work on Amazon Web Services instances Why not? And what is Google, Azure and DI doing differently

Firecracker relies on KVM in the Linux kernel which relies on VT-x or similar. Offering VT-x inside a VM that's already using VT-x is called nested virtualization. EC2 VMs do not support nested virtualization, while others do.

That said, it works fine on EC2 Bare Metal instances.

(n.b., I work on the virtualization stack on Google Compute Engine)

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#42

Post by paxys »

andrewstuart wrote: post #29

Note that this Amazon developed technology does not work on Amazon Web Services instances. It does however work on Google, Azure and Digital Ocean instances where you can configure nested virtualisation.

It does work on AWS on the instances that support nested virtualization, same as every other provider.

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#43

Post by tlrobinson »

jrk wrote: post #32
capableweb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were to guess, I'd guess because Firecracker is something "that good hackers would find interesting" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think the question is raised because Firecracker was released years ago and has been posted and discussed many times before.

“Are reposts ok?”

“If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#44

Post by bushbaba »

jsolson wrote: post #41
cutemonster wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> does not work on Amazon Web Services instances Why not? And what is Google, Azure and DI doing differently

Firecracker relies on KVM in the Linux kernel which relies on VT-x or similar. Offering VT-x inside a VM that's already using VT-x is called nested virtualization. EC2 VMs do not support nested virtualization, while others do. That said, it works fine on EC2 Bare Metal instances. (n.b., I work on the virtualization stack on Google Compute Engine)

Wouldn’t you want to run firecracker on bare metal anyways. Nested VMs come with a decent perf hit.

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#45

Post by weikju »

tlrobinson wrote: post #43
jrk wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the question is raised because Firecracker was released years ago and has been posted and discussed many times before.

“Are reposts ok?” “If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.” https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

I think the question is more along the lines of - was there another news, recently posted, that prompted this post?

Like for example if fly.io was announced yesterday, and they said they used Firecracker, then someone would submit this link about Firecracker.

So the original poster in this thread was wondering if there was something to that effect. Not decrying something being posted that was not new or already discussed before...

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#46

Post by mastax »

I just deployed a WordPress container on the same host that runs everything else. Makes me a bit uncomfortable. Was thinking about running a VM just as a Docker Swarm worker node, but this post reminded me that these virtualization runtimes exist. Looks like there's a drop-in containerd replacement using firecracker. Kata containers look a bit better supported, though?

Or am I too paranoid about container escapes?

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#47

Post by slimsag »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #38
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.

There’s also Koyeb. I’m not affiliated.

We also use it at Sourcegraph (to run arbitrary LSIF code indexers in a sandboxed environment)

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#48

Post by ignoramous »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #37
staticassertion wrote: post #2

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

Directly from Docker image: https://github.com/combust-labs/firebuild#high-level-example . I’m the author.

nb, building from docker is also what fly.io does: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22514017

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#49

Post by tapirl »

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.

From their docs, their product looks amazing. However I haven't successfully deployed my app on their platform: https://community.fly.io/t/first-app-fails-to-deploy/2754/3

This might be related to my network problem, I will try other deploy ways when I get some spare time.

Re: Firecracker MicroVMs

#50

Post by rad_gruchalski »

ignoramous wrote: post #48
rad_gruchalski wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Directly from Docker image: https://github.com/combust-labs/firebuild#high-level-example . I’m the author.

nb, building from docker is also what fly.io does: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22514017

Yes, I can also build from Dockerfile:

    sudo $GOPATH/bin/firebuild rootfs \
      --profile=standard \
      --dockerfile=git+https://github.com/hashicorp/docker-consul.git:/0.X/Dockerfile \
      --cni-network-name=machine-builds \
      --ssh-user=alpine \
      --vmlinux-id=vmlinux-v5.8 \
      --tag=combust-labs/consul:1.9.4
That SSH bit is no longer required as I'm using MMDS instead.
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