Firstly, can there be an easier way to stop a microVM mid execution in this single executable bottlefire format and then rerun that and it would start mid execution. (something akin to how criu does it?)
Secondly, and although this isn't related to your product but rather about microvm and that is if something like microvm could be run in normal cloud infrastructure?
I saw this article (https://blog.alexellis.io/how-to-run-firecracker-without-kvm...) and It mentioned PVM and I was thinking if this can be applied here because then I feel like if I can run a container as a microvm on big cloud and then stop it mid execution and rerun it elsewhere, then I have essentially got an incentive to use spot instances which are (I think) 80% more cheaper and I am just curious about it from a devops side of things.
Not yet - Firecracker supports snapshotting so this should be doable though!
> if something like microvm could be run in normal cloud infrastructure?
Some cloud providers - like GCP and DigitalOcean - do support nested virtualization, and they work pretty well with Firecracker. Using VM migration to run stable workloads on spot instances sounds very interesting :)
not necessarily. you can build custom kernel with pvm[1] and do it on aws.
Regarding the 2nd question, I feel like something can definitely be crafted that can enable running stable workloads on gcp/digitalocean spot instances and maybe what bake can do is really make the automation aspect of spot instances / VM migration easier...
Please don't get me wrong, this project looks really cool but I would actually like a first hand response as to (preferably) why this/bake project was created and when/why should someone use this..
I also have many more questions and I feel like haivng a community place can be really helpful here.
Although my open source purist heart wishes for you to use matrix, Its also understandable if you use discord. Do note that there are bridges so you could technically have both matrix and discord and bridge them.
Best wishes for your project.
Any chance of looking into 9p for rootfs? I've been wanting to grab images, extract locally and then launch the image in a lightweight VM whilst keeping the "guest" fs visible as a normal directory. (Complex but doable, I've had a PoC for a while but have been wanting to take it further)
Also, I wonder if this could be adapted to use Apple's Hypervisor.framework. That one also doesn't require root and ought to be able to spin up and down very quickly.
[1] https://github.com/rzane/docker2exe?tab=readme-ov-file#embed...
Crun can be/is used by podman/docker too so you could think that its essentially stripping docker down to its core of running oci containers and just taking the most lightweight and (fastest?) approach and embedding it directly into the executable.
I am sure that I might get somethings wrong, I usually do, so if I have an error, please do let me know as I don't wish to spread misinformation
This project on the other hand seems to be using bake https://github.com/losfair/bake which seems to take something like a docker container and I think essentially push it into something like .iso using squashfs The idea here is that they seem to embed firecracker itself into a single binary to actually just make it an executable that can run that microvm as it is.
And I think that bottlefire just seems to do something similar but they do it on their server side and seem to just provide you a binary to make things easy for you...
I am not sure with microvm's architecture but it seems that there are some additional features that you can get since they are VM, maybe you can get the ability of https://criu.org/Main_Page out of the box but this doesn't seem to be done right now but In my opinion is really very doable.
Another idea might be more security. I am going to refer to an article [1] which talks about flatpak but it has this line and I quote `containers are not sandboxed`, so I suppose that this can help blur the lines b/w containers by converting containers into microvm's and then leveraging vm's technology for sandboxing or some other mechanism rather easily as compared to docker (I see it use landlock which was new to me!)
article [1]: https://hanako.codeberg.page/
I'd be interested more generally in what is supported in terms of GPU. Is there such an overview somewhere?
We're doing something similar at E2B, we should chat!
