Cloud Computing Without Containers: Hello Isolates

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloud-computing-without-containers/

by metadat • 4 years ago

72 16 4 years ago

blog.cloudflare.com

metadat• 4 years ago

Past discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22506892

(4 years ago; 663 points, 241 comments)

Curious if anyone outside of CF has a success or challenge story to share about Isolates. Super cool tech.

Submission inspired by @kentonv's post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32287798

RedPanda250• 4 years ago

Here's one with more comments than the first link in your comment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18415708

dekhn• 4 years ago

there's a fair amount of fud in there. I was curious if they supported python and it says they compile the python to Javascript.

So, this is not really a product except for a limited user base: people writing web function. Much of cloud computing that is now hosted in containers is batch work (ML training, HPC jobs) that depends on a combination of dependencies, access to hardware, and a complex multithreading runtime.

Users of Lambda have demonstrated that it can do matrix multiplication at supercomputer throughput rates.

I wouldn't mind the post so much but it badly misreprents the nature of containers in cloud computing and does so in a way that makes me not want to be their customer.

kentonv3• 4 years ago

It's true that, at least at present, Cloudflare Workers is primarily meant to implement web application servers. There are obviously many other ways people use servers which Workers does not yet address.

I don't think the post was intended to mislead people into thinking Workers serves those other use cases well today (or 4 years ago, when it was written). Rather, I think Zack just wasn't thinking about batch work as he wrote. When you spend all your time focused on one problem space, it's easy to forget that others exist.

With that said, I do think the Workers architecture will be a great fit for batch work when we get to it. The reason being, infrastructure for batch work is often all about bringing the code to the data, rather than bringing the data to the code. Workers is extremely good at running code in whatever location is ideal, in extremely fine-grained units. Yes, supporting only JavaScript and WebAssembly will be a limitation, but I suspect the advantages will outweigh the disadvantages.

But again, we haven't had the chance to focus on that yet. If you're doing heavy batch work today, Workers probably isn't the best place for it. Yet.

(Disclosure: I'm the tech lead for Workers.)

saurik• 4 years ago

Related thread about "Pros and Cons of V8 isolates" that includes "the opposing argument" from the fly.io people:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31740885

paxys• 4 years ago

From the Cloudflare article:

Most importantly, a single process can run hundreds or thousands of Isolates, seamlessly switching between them. They make it possible to run untrusted code from many different customers within a single operating system process.

From the linked comment by a supposed fly.io engineer:

Under no circumstances should CloudFlare or anyone else be running multiple isolates in the same OS process. They need to be sandboxed in isolated processes. Chrome sandboxes them in isolated processes.

So I’m confused where the disconnect is here. One of them has to be wrong.

kentonv3• 4 years ago

Neither side is "right" or "wrong", because this is not actually a binary thing. The two sides are judging the level of risk involved and whether or not that level of risk is acceptable, and they are coming to different conclusions.

V8 is undeniably intended to be a secure sandbox. Chrome relied on V8 as the only thing isolating web sites from each other for about a decade. A couple years ago, Chrome implemented "strict site isolation", which adds defense in depth by also forcing every "site" into a separate OS process. However, this does not mean that the Chrome team no longer cares about V8 itself being secure. Strict site isolation is a defense-in-depth measure. Google will pay a bug bounty if you break either layer.

However, V8, like any piece of software, has bugs. The possibility of security bugs implies some level of risk. The question is, how much risk is there, and it is acceptable? V8 is complex, and as a result it tends to have more bugs than, say, a virtual machine hypervisor. Hence, it is argued that V8 is more risky. Some believe the level of risk is unacceptable for a server environment.

On the other hand, V8 receives more security research and better fuzzing than any other sandboxing technology. Most bugs in V8 are actually found by Google's own fuzzers. And process isolation is only one kind of defense-in-depth possible here; Cloudflare Workers implements many other types of defense-in-depth that align better with our particular requirements.[0]

My take -- as the tech lead of Cloudflare Workers -- is that people are broadly overestimating the risk because the approach is different. In fact, I personally believe that typical cloud environments which allow you to run arbitrary native-code binaries are much riskier. The reason is, sandboxing native code doesn't just require secure virtual machine software, it also requires bug-free hardware. CPUs are extremely complex, certainly much more complex than V8. Do we really believe they don't have any bugs which allow VM breakouts? What happens if someone finds such a bug, and it's not possible to mitigate without new silicon? Say it turns out some obscure instruction accidentally allows unchecked access to all physical memory -- what then? It would be quite a disaster for the industry.

In contrast, if your platform only accepts non-native code formats like JavaScript and WebAssembly, it's much easier to respond to such bugs by e.g. controlling access to the buggy instruction.

So frankly, my take is the entire industry has accepted a much higher level of risk already, but people don't talk about it much because it's already broadly accepted as the status quo. Cloudflare Workers gets more questions because we've made a different judgment.

With that said, it's absolutely possible for smart people to disagree on all these points, and probably neither side will ever be proven definitively right or wrong.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/mitigating-spectre-and-other-sec...

Havoc• 4 years ago

I think it also comes down to payload. CF has much more limited scope of what you can do in a worker, so not at all surprised they are more relaxed about isolation

e.g. I don't think you can connect to a redis instance from a worker (unless your redis provider implements a rest api)

afiori• 4 years ago

I am under the impression that keeping isolates in separate process is most important as a proactive defense for userspace specter-like attacks.

At the moment there should not be known vulnerabilities.

I believe that cloudflare removed some of the more risky JavaScript API in that regard.

scottydelta• 4 years ago

The way Cloudflare execute worker codes makes it very efficient to do things on the edge.

For example, with almost zero cost, you can have your cheap $2-$5 server hosting your web app serve tens of thousands of users concurrently by using worker cache api.

On top of that you can serve static files at ultra low response time and reduce queries to server by using a cdn like bunny.net.

What's amazing is, these technologies are virtually free for everyone unless your app has huge traffic and even then it's is very much affordable.

toddmorey• 4 years ago

Just giving author a hard time: when you start with "This is not meant to be an ad for Workers" but then go into listing advantages, detailed comparative pricing, and close with a "try now" CTA, what you've got is an ad for Workers.

bsaul• 4 years ago

i'm having a hard time getting enthusiastic about tech that facilitate turning computation power on and off on demand.

To me, the only real problem left in the web space is persistent data storage. This is the thing that doesn't scale, that's hard to migrate, that sometimes have hard consistency requirement, that has to be really secure, etc...

I've never ever been worried about running out of ephemeral servers. Am i the only one ?

jrm4• 4 years ago

Given something like Moore's law, this feels something like a power-play by cloudflare to just have more control over your stuff?

Cloud Computing Without Containers: Hello Isolates

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