Introduction to Unikernel: Building, deploying lightweight, secure applications

https://tallysolutions.com/technology/introduction-to-unikernel-2/

by eyberg • 12 months ago

42 20 12 months ago

perbu• 12 months ago

Unikernels are quite an intriguing concept. They'll be re-discovered every five years, like programmers keep re-discovering functional programming.

burnt-resistor3• 12 months ago

They're flying cars and VR.

People eventually come to realize they're not so great when having to apply real-world, cross-cutting concerns like access control, audit, logging, debugging, profiling, monitoring, throttling, backup, and recovery.

The emperor's new clothes might have a hole or two in them.

phendrenad2• 12 months ago

It seems that way because people are stuck thinking in terms of an operating system. Need access control? Put a file on the server. Need auditing? Log into the server. Need logging? A text file... on the server. None of these need be done this way, and in fact ways that make sense when you have a full operating system don't make sense with a unikernel. Hint: All of these things should be database-driven.

eyberg8• 12 months ago

Access Control: There is none internally. We don't have the notion of users.

Logging: Keep using whatever you want be it elasticsearch, syslog, cloudwatch, etc. No opinions here.

Debugging: GDB works fine and in many cases since you can simply export the vm in it's entirety and then attach to it locally this becomes even easier to debug than the same application running on linux.

Profiling: We support things like ftrace and of course things like prometheus you can export.

Monitoring: Kinda in the same boat as logging - keep using whatever you are using today - datadog, victoria metrics, etc.

Throttling: This is traditionally an app-level concern that someone would implement at perhaps a load balancing layer - keep using whatever you are using.

Backup/Recovery: Running unikernels make it trivial to backup as you can clone running vms. In fact most cloud deploys involve making a snapshot that is already stored as a 'backup' and makes things like rollback much easier to do.

wiradikusuma2• 12 months ago

Wake me up when you can unikernel-ize a Java framework like Quarkus or Spring.

eyberg8• 12 months ago

https://github.com/nanovms/ops-examples/tree/master/java/04-...

rwmj• 12 months ago

Running Java applications was the original mission of OSv (https://osv.io/). Reading the website now they seem to have pivoted to running unmodified Linux applications.

eyberg8• 12 months ago

The rabbit hole goes even deeper. Georgios was thinking about this with Jikes even earlier: https://gousios.org/pub/gousios-mscthesis.pdf

wiradikusuma2• 12 months ago

Does it mean it can run Java compiled to Native Image?

tuananh• 12 months ago

@eyberg: i'm curious on how NanosVM Inception works? what's included in the image here

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-lwk72eg6wfo3i

eyberg8• 12 months ago

Sorry - just now seeing this. This is a build of PVM that works with Nanos. We're also maintaining that patch set as I don't ever see it getting included into the kernel (not anytime soon anyways).

alrs• 12 months ago

Undead, undead, undead.

Introduction to Unikernel: Building, deploying lightweight, secure applications

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