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Having a tough time understanding the impacts of this work. Fast boot times matter if you boot often. So what’s the use case here? Hmm, actually I’m not sure I

Having a tough time understanding the impacts of this work. Fast boot times matter if you boot often. So what’s the use case here? Hmm, actually I’m not sure I even understand the whole “serverless” thing that much to be honest. Running FreeBSD as if it’s a “process” on Linux is interesting in a way but - who does this?

CodesInChaos 3y ago
> So what’s the use case here? Spinning up additional "servers" in the cloud when you receive many incoming requests. If requests are held in a queue waiting for the new server to start, a fast boot process will reduce the latency for those requests. > Running FreeBSD as if it’s a “process” on Linux is interesting in a way but - who does this? Cloud providers run VMs of different customers on the same physical machine. Hypervisors like Firecracker minimize the attack surface (smaller risk of local privilege escalation) and VM overhead (run more instances on one machine).
- butterisgood 3y ago
  Ah alright. I’ve seen this done with an Erlang VM on Xen where Erlang is the “OS”. To me that seems a little more natural. But Unix as an “API” can work too though the processes are not as lightweight as Erlang’s.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Semaphor 3y ago
Besides what sibling said, they mention a more general use case towards the end: > We can see a lot of potential uses for microVMs, not just in cloud scenarios. The ability to run a single program built for one OS on top of a totally different OS, without the overhead of running a full emulated environment all the time, could be very handy in all kinds of situations.
avgcorrection 3y ago
All I know about turtles is that they should be made out of turtles and all the way down.
gumballindie 3y ago
Serverless is a relatively new marketing term, old by tech world standards, whereby you "don't need infrastructure". Your code gets executed into sort of virtual machines "small enough" to boot up on demand and execute your specific code. You don't need to manage dependencies or os configs. You define an "entry point" within your chosen programing language and the vm executes it on demand. The vm stays active for a set time. Beyond that time a new request requires a "cold start" - this can be slow if the OS' boot time is slow. Also this is meant to make things easier and cheaper. But they are anything but easier and anything but cheaper compared to non serverless. It also leads to captive customers. But it drives a whole industry of training, consulting and selling AWS services.
mrighele 3y ago
It was done in the context of running FreeBSD under the Firecracker platform [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33243529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33243529
hotnfresh 3y ago
> Hmm, actually I’m not sure I even understand the whole “serverless” thing that much to be honest. A whole bunch of folks have given up on shared operating systems at a security, access control, data governance, and maintainability (reproducibility) level. At least if your goal is to create software for some purpose other than building server infrastructure. Some of them have decided that if you’re going to want things like database servers and ssh bastions and VPN servers and cache servers et c to live on dedicated machines or VMs for various good reasons anyway… and you let something else trigger your custom code as needed, as distinct processes with maybe a little hot caching, like in old school PHP or CGI or Inetd (remember that?!), why, now it’s looking an awful lot like you don’t really have a reason to manage a server for that at all, if someone else can provide some service to trigger your code under certain circumstances, if your code and your new unit of process isolation (a whole damn OS) can start up fast enough. Now if you pay for managed versions of all those other 3rd party software packages you use, so you don’t need to hire a couple PostgreSQL experts to make upgrades anything but nail-biting, for example—congrats, you’ve fully reached “serverless” in the “cloud”.
- butterisgood 3y ago
  So, why re-use a time sharing, multi-user OS to run your apps? Don't you just need a multi-core capable, POSIX environment? Arguably POSIX doesn't really matter anymore does it? It's Linux or it doesn't matter in a lot of cases (sadly). Seems like overkill. Sometimes optimal solutions are the available ones, sure, but is no one working on a POSIX exokernel "includeos" like thing?
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    Probably one or more people are working on that. But Linux and FreeBSD exist and have had a whole lot of testing hours put into them, both per se and to test various libraries and programs using them as their OS, so for now, that’s the safe option.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

CodesInChaos 3y ago

> So what’s the use case here? Spinning up additional "servers" in the cloud when you receive many incoming requests. If requests are held in a queue waiting for the new server to start, a fast boot process will reduce the latency for those requests. > Running FreeBSD as if it’s a “process” on Linux is interesting in a way but - who does this? Cloud providers run VMs of different customers on the same physical machine. Hypervisors like Firecracker minimize the attack surface (smaller risk of local privilege escalation) and VM overhead (run more instances on one machine).

butterisgood 3y ago
Ah alright. I’ve seen this done with an Erlang VM on Xen where Erlang is the “OS”. To me that seems a little more natural. But Unix as an “API” can work too though the processes are not as lightweight as Erlang’s.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Semaphor 3y ago

Besides what sibling said, they mention a more general use case towards the end: > We can see a lot of potential uses for microVMs, not just in cloud scenarios. The ability to run a single program built for one OS on top of a totally different OS, without the overhead of running a full emulated environment all the time, could be very handy in all kinds of situations.

avgcorrection 3y ago

All I know about turtles is that they should be made out of turtles and all the way down.

gumballindie 3y ago

Serverless is a relatively new marketing term, old by tech world standards, whereby you "don't need infrastructure". Your code gets executed into sort of virtual machines "small enough" to boot up on demand and execute your specific code. You don't need to manage dependencies or os configs. You define an "entry point" within your chosen programing language and the vm executes it on demand. The vm stays active for a set time. Beyond that time a new request requires a "cold start" - this can be slow if the OS' boot time is slow. Also this is meant to make things easier and cheaper. But they are anything but easier and anything but cheaper compared to non serverless. It also leads to captive customers. But it drives a whole industry of training, consulting and selling AWS services.

mrighele 3y ago

It was done in the context of running FreeBSD under the Firecracker platform [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33243529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33243529

hotnfresh 3y ago

> Hmm, actually I’m not sure I even understand the whole “serverless” thing that much to be honest. A whole bunch of folks have given up on shared operating systems at a security, access control, data governance, and maintainability (reproducibility) level. At least if your goal is to create software for some purpose other than building server infrastructure. Some of them have decided that if you’re going to want things like database servers and ssh bastions and VPN servers and cache servers et c to live on dedicated machines or VMs for various good reasons anyway… and you let something else trigger your custom code as needed, as distinct processes with maybe a little hot caching, like in old school PHP or CGI or Inetd (remember that?!), why, now it’s looking an awful lot like you don’t really have a reason to manage a server for that at all, if someone else can provide some service to trigger your code under certain circumstances, if your code and your new unit of process isolation (a whole damn OS) can start up fast enough. Now if you pay for managed versions of all those other 3rd party software packages you use, so you don’t need to hire a couple PostgreSQL experts to make upgrades anything but nail-biting, for example—congrats, you’ve fully reached “serverless” in the “cloud”.

butterisgood 3y ago
So, why re-use a time sharing, multi-user OS to run your apps? Don't you just need a multi-core capable, POSIX environment? Arguably POSIX doesn't really matter anymore does it? It's Linux or it doesn't matter in a lot of cases (sadly). Seems like overkill. Sometimes optimal solutions are the available ones, sure, but is no one working on a POSIX exokernel "includeos" like thing?
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Probably one or more people are working on that. But Linux and FreeBSD exist and have had a whole lot of testing hours put into them, both per se and to test various libraries and programs using them as their OS, so for now, that’s the safe option.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]