NanoVMs Let You Run Your Apps Faster and Safer with Unikernels
Running in Production
Introduction
The running in production podcast is a weekly look at what developers and engineers are doing on the web. Today, we talk to en eiberg about uni ceronels - small virtual machines that can only run one programme. En eiberg: "A uni coal just allows you to deploy a single application as a small, light weight virtual machine"
In this episode of Running in Production, Ian Eyberg goes over creating a Unikernel with C as well as host a few sites supporting his tool with Go. It’s hosted on Google Cloud and their own data center. Nanos has been available since 2020.
Ian talks about what a Unikernel is, their open source tools and how they manage their own services. This episode has a healthy mix between background knowledge on Unikernels and how they (as a company) set up their infrastructure.
It’s worth pointing out you can run your existing applications in a Unikernel without having to change how it’s written and they support running them on most major hosting providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean, your own hardware, etc.).
Topics Include
- 1:44 – What is a Unikernel? How is it different than a traditional VM or container?
- 7:58 – There’s a free and open source tool and an optional SAAS offering
- 10:07 – How it’s possible to build a new deployable golden image in 2 minutes
- 12:12 – Motivation to use Go for building the surrounding sites and services
- 16:51 – Certain organizations are pushing decent traffic through their Unikernel driven apps
- 19:02 – How you can run a multi-service app with Nanos (web + worker + db + cache, etc.)
- 22:59 – ops.city and nanos.org are a single Go binary / 1 Unikernel driven app
- 25:37 – The nanovms.com site is a bit more involved and has Stripe integration
- 28:08 – I never heard of the term Unikernel until today
- 30:20 – nginx isn’t sitting in front of the Go app and how Unikernels can be so fast
- 40:29 – With a Unikernel approach you can easily move between hosting providers
- 44:23 – SSL certs are handled directly by the Go app for their sites
- 49:56 – nanos.org and ops.city use GCP and nanovms.com is on their own hardware
- 54:26 – Why they went with their own data center for hosting and their server specs / costs
- 1:02:02 – Terraform, Ansible and similar tools aren’t being used to set up anything
- 1:04:21 – What the deployment process looks like for their services
- 1:10:40 – You can run all of this on a Raspberry Pi 4
- 1:13:15 – What does the development process look like with a Unikernel driven app?
- 1:16:21 – Dealing with secrets in production
- 1:17:55 – Databases are backed up regularly and how logs are handled
- 1:23:52 – Getting notified of errors and up-time reports from updown.io
- 1:25:52 – Mailgun is used for sending out transactional emails
- 1:26:45 – Best tips? Keep it simple (seriously)
- 1:30:05 – Thoughts on the Plan9 operating system
- 1:34:06 – You don’t need to change how you write your apps to run them in a Unikernel
- 1:40:07 – The code for Nanos is open source on GitHub
Links
📄 References
- https://ops.city/
- https://nanos.org/
- https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/
- https://deepdiscountservers.com/
- https://he.net/
- https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257
⚙️ Tech Stack
🛠 Libraries Used
Support the Show
This episode does not have a sponsor and this podcast is a labor of love. If you want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my courses or suggest one to a friend.
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