firebuild VS firecracker-container

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.

There is this project, which I have never used, but seems promising. https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker-container...

How does that compare to firecracker-containerd?

https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker-container...

This repository enables the use of a container runtime, containerd, to manage Firecracker microVMs. Like traditional containers, Firecracker microVMs offer fast start-up and shut-down and minimal overhead. Unlike traditional containers, however, they can provide an additional layer of isolation via the KVM hypervisor.

I'm really impressed by fly.io, and the candidness with which they share some of their really awesome technology. Being container-first is the next step for PaaS IMO and they are ahead of the pack.

I aim to build a platform like theirs someday (probably not any time soon) but I don't think I'd do any of what they're doing -- it feels unnecessary. Bear with me as I recently learned that they use nomad[0] and some of these suggestions are kubernetes projects but I'd love to hear why the following technologies were decided against (if they were):

- kata-containers[1] (it does the whole container -> VM flow for you, automatically, nemu, firecracker) with multiple VMM options[2]

- linuxkit[3] (let's say you didn't go with kata-containers, this is another container->VM path)

- firecracker-containerd[4] (very minimal keep-your-container-but-run-it-as-a-VM)

- kubevirt[5] (if you just want to actually run VMs, regardless of how you built them)

- Ceph[6] for storage -- make LVM pools and just give them to Ceph, you'll get blocks, distributed filesystems (CephFS), and object gateways (S3/Swift) out of it (in the k8s space Rook manages this)

As an aside to all this, there's also LXD, which supports running "system" (user namespace isolated) containers, VMs (somewhat recent[7][8]), live migration via criu[9], management/migration of underlying filesystems, runs on LVM or zfs[10], it's basically all-in-one, but does fall behind in terms of ecosystem since everyone else is aboard the "cloud native"/"works-with-kubernetes" train.

I've basically how I plan to run a service like fly.io if I ever did -- so maybe my secret is out, but I sure would like to know just how much of this fly.io got built on (if any of it), and/or what was turned down.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26745514

[1]: https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers

[2]: https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/blob/2fc7...

[3]: https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit

[4]: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker-container...

[5]: https://github.com/kubevirt/kubevirt

[6]: https://docs.ceph.com/

[7]: https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/running-virtual-machin...

[8]: https://github.com/lxc/lxd/issues/6205

[9]: https://criu.org/Main_Page

[10]: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/docs/master/storage