actuated VS firebuild

I've been following along with Actuated and it seems to address many of the issues I have with GitHub hosted runners... But I'd really rather have GitHub improve their product and stop chasing the magical money tree that is Copilot.

IDK if you noticed this, but actuated.dev is a service that addresses this concern on the top line of their elevator pitch. (That's the same site which this very blog is posted on.)

Hi, I'm Alex the founder of actuated. We've been following the monetizing innovation and The Right It playbooks here, and only investing as much time and money as it seems to make sense given customer interest.

It was great to see our message resonate so much on the front page a couple of weeks ago. Thanks for your support.

Here's the next iteration, our website. It's made with Tailwind UI and there'll be more to come.

If what we're building resonates with you, please reach out for a quick user interview and to get started with actuated.

We have live customers and they've had good results. But we want to prove that we can help more teams like yours.

https://actuated.dev/

This is really cool. I've also been working with Firecracker, but for isolated CI runners with Docker and KinD/K3s support. Starting with GitHub Actions [1] I've also had interest in making OpenFaaS use pause/resume from Gatsby.js who wanted to reduce their hosting costs. The main challenges were around the networking - if you use CNI and the Go SDK [2] then restores simply don't work. Not sure if you're working with netlink and IMAP directly to get around it?

My question is how are you guaranteeing uniqueness, or do you only clone snapshots for a single tenant? [3]

[1] https://github.com/self-actuated/actuated

A Dockerfile is just a file with a bunch of commands to execute and get a working "computer". https://github.com/combust-labs/firebuild is fairly aged translation of the Dockerfile to a VM rootfs.

Regarding turning Dockerfiles into a MicroVM: https://gruchalski.com/posts/2021-03-23-introducing-firebuil..., on GitHub: https://github.com/combust-labs/firebuild. This could get you started.

Disclaimer: I’m the author.

> See, and in almost all of my use-cases, I really do. I do HPC computing, which is almost always a multi-tenant environment.

Maybe you need firecracker with something along the lines of https://github.com/combust-labs/firebuild?

I was the one who posted that question and I deleted it because I understood I was asking to compare apple to oranges. Firecracker uses KVM under the hood. With regards to the overhead, sure, there's going to be resources needed but firecracker is pretty good at running VMs will low level overhead. We're talking thousands on a single host.

I've done some fair share of evaluating firecracker for https://github.com/combust-labs/firebuild and the need to provision is red herring. firebuild can run a VM directly from a Dockerfile and Docker image. Fly.io team does something similar. It's basically a fully functional app out of the container within a matter of milliseconds.

What would be nice is to see a direct comparison between your solution and firecracker.

I am working on something like this: https://github.com/combust-labs/firebuild.

From a Dockerfile, it's not as simple without creating an image first.