bottlerocket VS firecracker

Don't overlook Bottlerocket, which despite coming out of AWS is not (AFAIK) AWS-centric: https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket#readme

It's also super handy for writing out static Pod manifests to have replace the brain-damaging Ignition as a less stupid alternative to cloud-init

According to this discussion - starting with Bottlerocket 1.13.0 (Mar 2023) new distributions will default to using Cgroups v2 interface for process organization and enforcing resource limits.

Well, the link I provided references the Bottlerocket docs which explains the control container and the admin container and also how you can configure Bottlerocket via the User Data field when launching it as an AMI. All the information appears to be in the docs

https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket/blob/develop...

On the server-side, there's Bottlerocket OS [1] (Amazon). They use A/B partitions for upgrades, and the idea is that you just run containers for anything non-base. Boot containers are used to do custom configuration at boot, and host-container (or DaemonSet, if you run K8S) is used for long-running services.

[1] https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket

Bottlerocket OS.

To add to the other excellent answers, I would recommend adding Bottlerocket to your reading list: https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket#readme

I'm also aware of (but haven't used) https://github.com/siderolabs/talos#readme

I just realized your question may have implied a desktop os, whereas Bottlerocket, Flatcar, and likely the others in this specific thread are server-side. I don't have much experience with trying to solve that problem on the desktop except for the horror-show that is snap

https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket/issues/2855 soon for bottlerocket, maybe you’ll see Amazon Linux 2023 for eks nodes soon too?

I think open sourcing for free labor is a common misconception. Most corporate led open source projects (eg, https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket from AWS or https://github.com/facebook/relay from Facebook) still require a team of employees.

What he said is true, AWS uses Rust heavily in some of AWS core systems https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/why-aws-is-the-best-plac....

Some of the open source projects you can find are AWS Firecracker https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker and Cloudflare Pingora https://github.com/cloudflare/pingora

This architecture leverages microVMs for rapid scaling and high-density workloads. But does it work for GPU? The answer is no. You can look at the old 2019 GitHub issue and the comments to it to get the bigger picture of why it is so.

Hi, I'm the CEO of the company that built this SDK.

We're a company called E2B [0]. We're building and open-source [1] secure environments for running untrusted AI-generated code and AI agents. We call these environments sandboxes and they are built on top of micro VM called Firecracker [2].

You can think of us as giving small cloud computers to LLMs.

We recently created a dedicated SDK for building custom code interpreters in Python or JS/TS. We saw this need after a lot of our users have been adding code execution capabilities to their AI apps with our core SDK [3]. These use cases were often centered around AI data analysis so code interpreter-like behavior made sense

The way our code interpret SDK works is by spawning an E2B sandbox with Jupyter Server. We then communicate with this Jupyter server through Jupyter Kernel messaging protocol [4].

We don't do any wrapping around LLM, any prompting, or any agent-like framework. We leave all of that on users. We're really just a boring code execution layer that sats at the bottom that we're building specifically for the future software that will be building another software. We work with any LLM. Here's how we added code interpreter to Claude [5].

Our long-term plan is to build an automated AWS for AI apps and agents.

Happy to answer any questions and hear feedback!

[0] https://e2b.dev/

[1] https://github.com/e2b-dev

[2] https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

[3] https://e2b.dev/docs

[4] https://jupyter-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/messaging.ht...

[5] https://github.com/e2b-dev/e2b-cookbook/blob/main/examples/c...

As far as I know, Fly uses Firecracker for their VMs. I've been following Firecracker for a while now (even using it in a project), and they don't support GPUs out of the box (and have no plan to support it [1]).

I'm curious to know how Fly figured their own GPU support with Firecracker. In the past they had some very detailed technical posts on how they achieved certain things, so I'm hoping we'll see one on their GPU support in the future!

[1]: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/issues/11...

I pass through a GPU and USB hub to a VM running on a machine in the garage. An optical video cable and network compatible USB extender brings the interface to a different room making it my primary “desktop” computer (and an outdated laptop as a backup device). Doesn’t get more silent and cool than this. Another VM on the garage machine gets a bunch of hard drives passed through to it.

That said, hardware passthrough/VFIO is likely out of the current realistic scope for this project. VM boot times can be optimized if you never look for hardware to initialize in the first place. Though they are still likely initializing a network interface of some sort.

“MicroVM” seems to be a term used when as much as possible is stripped from a VM, such as with https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

According to their own FAQ it is indeed: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main...

What about microVMs like firecracker?

Dynamic memory management - Firecracker's RAM footprint starts low, but once a workload inside allocates RAM, Firecracker will never return it to the host system. After running several workloads inside, you end up with an idling VM that consumes 32 GB of RAM on the host, even though it doesn't need any of it.

Firecracker has a balloon device you can inflate (ie: acquire as much memory inside the VM as possible) and then deflate... returning the memory to the host.

https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main...

Very few things in those companies are being written in Rust, and half of those projects chose Rust around ideological reasons rather than technical, with plenty of 'unsafe' thrown in for performance reasons

https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/search?q=...

The fact that 'unsafe' even exists in Rust means it's no better than C with some macros.

Don't get me wrong, Rust has it's place, like all the other languages that came about for various reasons, but it's not going to gain wide adoption.

Future of programming consists of 2 languages - something like C that has a small instruction set for adopting to new hardware, and something that is very high level, higher than Python with LLM in the background. Everything in the middle is fodder.