aws-codebuild-docker-images VS gvisor

Based on public repository for Codebuild Image, the image base will be the Ubuntu standard 7.0.

This is basically what CodeBuild does.

The default Docker containers that CodeBuild uses (you can create your own) and the shell script it uses to parse the yaml configuration file (mostly a list of shell scripts) are all open source and the entire process can be run locally.

https://github.com/aws/aws-codebuild-docker-images

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codebuild/latest/userguide/use-c...

Disclaimer: I work for AWS. But nowhere near the team that developed Firecracker

Disclaimer: I work for AWS in Professional Services. All opinions are my own.

The beauty about CodeBuild is that there is no “lock-in”. All it is fundamentally is a Linux or Windows Docker container with popular language runtimes and a shell script that processes a yaml file or you can supply your own Docker container.

You just put a bunch of bash commands or PowerShell commands in the yaml file and it runs anything.

The Docker container and the shell scripts are all open source and you can quite easily run them locally.

I could see outside of AWS keeping your Docker containers for your specific build environments in a local repository and doing all of your builds inside them using Jenkins.

https://github.com/aws/aws-codebuild-docker-images

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codebuild/latest/userguide/use-c...

For a “batteries included” approach though, I really like Azure DevOps Pipelines.

I’ve even done a couple of integrations between Azure DevOps and AWS when we had clients that are Microsoft shops.

https://aws.amazon.com/vsts/

For AWS, if you use CodeCommit (AWS git service), all access is via IAM and granular permissions. If you integrate with Azure DevOps, the AWS credentials do have to be stored in a separate MS hosted credential storage.

CodeBuild also supports at least Github natively.

I’m not shilling for AWS. I have an MS development background (.Net) and only have “DevOps” experience using AWS and Microsoft tooling.

Docker Images provided by the CodeBuild team should be updated regularly and should support all "modern" toolkits. The open source project has some activity, but an issue for supporting newer Android versions is now open for some time...

The runtimes available and exposed by CodePipeline support Android runtime 29 – and the Docker images are provisioned using Java 8. Unfortunately, as of July 2021, the Android gradle tools (used by Flutter) require Java 11. I have created an issue in the corresponding Github (see here) but needed to find a workaround to move on – I think I’ve found one, but I hope that anyone reading this might have a better way or idea?

$ git clone https://github.com/aws/aws-codebuild-docker-images.git $ cd aws-codebuild-docker-images/al2/aarch64/standard/2.0 $ docker build -t codebuild/amazonlinux2-aarch64-standard:2.0 .

This also is the place where we specify this is an AArch64 build. The managed image indicates to use a standard image provided by AWS. The source of the Graviton2 image can be found on GitHub.

🏗 AWS CodeBuild Local Builds - Simulate a CodeBuild environment locally to quickly troubleshoot the commands and settings located in the BuildSpec file.

Isn't gVisor kind of this as well?

"gVisor is an application kernel for containers. It limits the host kernel surface accessible to the application while still giving the application access to all the features it expects. Unlike most kernels, gVisor does not assume or require a fixed set of physical resources; instead, it leverages existing host kernel functionality and runs as a normal process. In other words, gVisor implements Linux by way of Linux."

https://github.com/google/gvisor

This sort of feels like seeing someone riding a bike and saying: why don’t they just get a car? The simple fact is that containers and VMs are quite different. Whether something uses VMX and friends or not is also a red herring, as gVisor also “rolls it own VMM” [1].

[1] https://github.com/google/gvisor/tree/master/pkg/sentry/plat...

There's two major production-ready Go-based operating system(-ish) projects:

- Google's gVisor[1] (a re-implementation of a significant subset of the Linux syscall ABI for isolation, also mentioned in the article)

- USBArmory's Tamago[2] (a single-threaded bare-metal Go runtime for SOCs)

Both of these are security-focused with a clear trade off: sacrifice some performance for memory safe and excellent readability (and auditability). I feel like that's the sweet spot for low-level Go - projects that need memory safety but would rather trade some performance for simplicity.

[1]: https://github.com/google/gvisor

[2]: https://github.com/usbarmory/tamago

It uses gVisor to create a TCP/IP stack in userspace, and starts a wireguard interface on it, which the HTTP server from http.Serve listens on. The library will print a URL after startup, where you can access your server. You can create multiple listeners in one binary.

The playground compiles the program with GOOS=linux, GOARCH=amd64 and runs the program with gVisor. Detailed documentation is available at the gVisor site.

You could use a container sandbox like gVisor, light virtual machines as containers (Kata containers, firecracker + containerd) or full virtual machines (virtlet as a CRI).