firebuild VS kata-containers

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.

Seems like Fly.io Machines are trying reimplement Kata Containers with the Firecracker backend [0].

Kata has a guest image and guest agent to run multiple isolated containers [1].

[0] https://katacontainers.io/

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

> Last time I looked (a few months ago), the documentation was pretty sparse or outdated.

It still is, though it works somewhat seamlessly when installing with https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/blob/main...

Though only one of the hypervisors works well.

Better to use a secure VM, can even get container-like VMs with kata-containers

As I understand,Kata Containers

Kubernetes using Kata containers as a containerd backend

https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/blob/main...

My home k8s cluster is now "locked down" using micro-vms (kata-containers[0]), pod level firewalling (cilium[1]), permission-limited container users, and mostly immutable environments. Given how quickly I rolled this out; the tools to enhance cluster environment security seem more accessible now than my previous research a few years ago.

I know it's not exactly a production setup, but I really do feel that it's the most secure runtime environment I've ever had accessible at home. Probably more so than my desktops, which you could argue undermines most of my effort, but I like to think I'm pretty careful.

In the beginning I was very skeptical, but being able to just build a docker/OCI image and then manage its relationships with other services with "one pane of glass" that I can commit to git is so much simpler to me than my previous workflows. My previous setup involved messing with a bunch of tools like packer, cloud-init, terraform, ansible, libvirt, whatever firewall frontend was on the OS, and occasionally sshing in for anything not covered.

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

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

Kata Containers https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers