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> Simultaneously, they don’t use a virtual machine or a container, which means you are actually running closer to the metal than any other form of cloud computi

by _wmd 8y ago

> Simultaneously, they don’t use a virtual machine or a container, which means you are actually running closer to the metal than any other form of cloud computing I’m aware of I recognize this is just a little marketing (which is fine), but I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean any more.. containers have identical efficiency to running on a raw VM, and VMs only trap to emulation in very few circumstances (e.g. IO) any time in the past decade. Running pure compute load in a container, guest VM or host VM should have almost identical performance.

madmax96 8y ago
Especially since containers use vanilla processes and light-weight access control mechanisms that I wager V8 uses some of. But they are running multiple client's services in the same process, so that's how they're saving - less context switching, smaller memory footprint, etc. I'm interested in how isolated the client's applications actually are...
- iforgotpassword 8y ago
  Well, theoretically, perfectly. Practically, there's some exploits lingering in there for sure. But that's true for virtualizers too, so... As the article says, faster spinup (since v8 is already running) seems to be the customer's greatest advantage only, saving an order of magnitude of memory is certainly a big deal for the operator. I think since you can compile pretty Much anything to webassembly, porting over some existing tools might even be viable.
kentonv 8y ago
Running a single tenant in a container or VM should have the same performance as bare metal. The problems come when you want to scale the number of tenants, incurring RAM and context switching overhead. On these measures, containers are quite a bit lighter than VMs, but still quite a bit heavier than isolates. When you're only aiming to split a machine 10 ways, this might not matter, but we're targeting splitting a machine 10,000 ways, which calls for entirely new tech. (Disclosure: I'm the tech lead for Workers.)

by _wmd 8y ago

madmax96 8y ago

Especially since containers use vanilla processes and light-weight access control mechanisms that I wager V8 uses some of. But they are running multiple client's services in the same process, so that's how they're saving - less context switching, smaller memory footprint, etc. I'm interested in how isolated the client's applications actually are...

iforgotpassword 8y ago
Well, theoretically, perfectly. Practically, there's some exploits lingering in there for sure. But that's true for virtualizers too, so... As the article says, faster spinup (since v8 is already running) seems to be the customer's greatest advantage only, saving an order of magnitude of memory is certainly a big deal for the operator. I think since you can compile pretty Much anything to webassembly, porting over some existing tools might even be viable.

kentonv 8y ago

Running a single tenant in a container or VM should have the same performance as bare metal. The problems come when you want to scale the number of tenants, incurring RAM and context switching overhead. On these measures, containers are quite a bit lighter than VMs, but still quite a bit heavier than isolates. When you're only aiming to split a machine 10 ways, this might not matter, but we're targeting splitting a machine 10,000 ways, which calls for entirely new tech. (Disclosure: I'm the tech lead for Workers.)