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The Azure Upstream team has been working on a really fast hypervisor library written in Rust for the past three years. It does less than you'd conventionally do

The Azure Upstream team has been working on a really fast hypervisor library written in Rust for the past three years. It does less than you'd conventionally do with hypervisors, but in turn it can start VMs around 2 orders of magnitude faster (around 1-2ms/VM). I think this is really cool, and the library was just released on GitHub for anyone to try. I’m happy I got to help them write their announcement post — and I figured this might be interesting for folks here!

dangoodmanUT 2y ago
Do you think requiring to use their packages is too limiting for widespread usage? Seems like you're forced to use Rust or C atm. This seems like a limitation that sits in a somewhat unusable place: For something simple and platform-specific (e.g. a HTTP transform) we can just use JS where the boot time perf makes up for the execution perf, and for something more serious like a full-fledged API 120ms should be more than enough time (and we can preemtively scale as long as we're not already at 0)
- yoshuaw 2y ago
  The way to think about Hyperlight is as a security substrate intended to host application runtimes. You’re right that the Hyperlight API only supports C and Rust today — but you can use that to for example load Python or JS runtimes which can then execute those languages natively. But we might be able to do even better than that by leveraging Wasm Components [1] and WASI 0.2 [2]. Using a VM guest based on Wasmtime, suddenly it becomes possible to run functions written in any language that can compile to Wasm Components — all using standard tooling and interfaces. I believe the team has a prototype VM guest based on Wasmtime working, but they still needed a little more time before it’s ready to be published. Stay tuned for future announcements? [1]: https://component-model.bytecodealliance.org/introduction.html https://component-model.bytecodealliance.org/introduction.ht... [2]: https://wasi.dev https://wasi.dev
  - 0x457 2y ago
    We went full circle - I remember using python wrapper to run Rust on AWS Lambda.

dangoodmanUT 2y ago

Do you think requiring to use their packages is too limiting for widespread usage? Seems like you're forced to use Rust or C atm. This seems like a limitation that sits in a somewhat unusable place: For something simple and platform-specific (e.g. a HTTP transform) we can just use JS where the boot time perf makes up for the execution perf, and for something more serious like a full-fledged API 120ms should be more than enough time (and we can preemtively scale as long as we're not already at 0)

yoshuaw 2y ago
The way to think about Hyperlight is as a security substrate intended to host application runtimes. You’re right that the Hyperlight API only supports C and Rust today — but you can use that to for example load Python or JS runtimes which can then execute those languages natively. But we might be able to do even better than that by leveraging Wasm Components [1] and WASI 0.2 [2]. Using a VM guest based on Wasmtime, suddenly it becomes possible to run functions written in any language that can compile to Wasm Components — all using standard tooling and interfaces. I believe the team has a prototype VM guest based on Wasmtime working, but they still needed a little more time before it’s ready to be published. Stay tuned for future announcements? [1]: https://component-model.bytecodealliance.org/introduction.html https://component-model.bytecodealliance.org/introduction.ht... [2]: https://wasi.dev https://wasi.dev
- 0x457 2y ago
  We went full circle - I remember using python wrapper to run Rust on AWS Lambda.