kuasar VS orbstack

Right now most early examples alas boot a container with a wasm runtime for each wasm instance, which is a sad waste. The whole advantage of wasm should be very lightweight low overhead wasm runtime instances atop a common wasm process. Having a process or container for each instance loses a ton of the benefit, makes it not much better than a regular container.

Thankfully there is work like the Containerd Sandbox API which enables new architectures like this. https://github.com/containerd/containerd/issues/4131

It's still being used to spawn a wasm processes per instance for now, but container runtime project Kuasar is already using the Sandbox API to save significant resources, and has already chimed in in comments on HN to express a desire to have shared-process/multi-wasm-instamxe runtimes, which could indeed allow sub ms spawning that could enable instance per request architectures. https://github.com/kuasar-io/kuasar

Orbstack is a Docker desktop alternative that I've been using for a while now. In my opinion the main selling point is that it's a native app for macOS and doesn't rely on Docker Machine to create VMs, meaning that its a lot faster and less resource intensive. It is still very new, so there are some rough edges, but I think it's worth a shot. I think its only supported on macOS at the moment, so that might be a problem for some of you 😔

OrbStack is a fast and free Docker Desktop replacement for personal use. It comes with a configured K8s cluster, which is useful for local testing.

I've really enjoyed using Orbstack: https://orbstack.dev/

it also has support for Linux VMs and kubernetes (although i haven't tried that yet)

It's worse than that if you're a business. If you simply want to use Docker Desktop on Mac, you're required to get Docker Team ($15/user/mo for <100 users) or Docker Business ($24/user/mo for 100+ users). Even if you want literally zero of the cloud features you're required to pay this amount.

I highly recommend OrbStack (https://orbstack.dev/) instead. It's $8/user/mo for businesses and you get something that is faster, easier on your battery, and more simple to use. We switched hundreds of engineers over to it at Instacart and it was seamless.

OrbStack is great in a lot of ways, and I universally prefer it over Docker for Mac.

That being said, it wasn't always been smooth sailing. Under the hood, OrbStack uses an 8TB sparse disk image, which doesn't play nice with most backup software.

https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/29

It caused me problems with Backblaze, but the Github issues for this show that it also breaks all sorts of backup software, including tarsnap, Druva inSync, Carbon Cloner, iDrive, Carbonite, and even Time Machine itself when formatted with HFS+, apparently.

The official position is "won't fix", because it's an Apple technology, and backup software should support that. While technically correct, realistically, sparse image support was not very widespread at the time. (I have no idea about now, since I gave up trying to back up my Orbstack image with my whole disk backup.)

I like Orbstack, but I wish the devs had moved to exclude the disk image from backups immediately, instead of arguing with people about it for a year first.

All that being said, I do still like OrbStack a lot, and I hope to never see a repeat of this problem and how it was handled.

The app depends on several packages to run, so I need to install them locally too. I used a combination of brew and orbstack / docker for installing packages. Some dependencies for this project are redis, mongodb and memcache

I don’t use it for anything more than spinning up dev DBs locally, but I know it supports Kubernetes in some form or another.

[1] https://orbstack.dev

I recommend checking out OrbStack[0] for containers and VMs on MacOS.

It’s really, really, really awesome and performant. And it seems to be a one-man show. Really impressive.

Most I’ve shown it to have very quickly switched to it.

(I’m completely unaffiliated, just a happy user)

[0]: https://orbstack.dev/

For a brief moment, I thought this was related to https://orbstack.dev

If you use a Mac and just want to mess around with linux try something like Orbstack(https://orbstack.dev/) to start up VMs and mess around. The benefit of this is you're going to break things a bunch as you get started. Going from there I'd start looking automating the deployment of the various components the 'old fashioned' way aka writing shell scripts/using SSH. Once you do that then go to using things like Ansible or Terraform etc.