NanoVMs Let You Run Your Apps Faster and Safer with Unikernels
Running in Production
Is There a Need for No Sis Calls?
There's like 11 or 12 different um implementations. U, so some of em are language specific. Then you have what we call the posix variety. And that's your o s b up runs and nanos belongs in that category. The norm user, we say, whatever your application is on lennex to day, whether it's libs two point this or, you know, two point three, or whatever, just keep it as it is. Ops will look at the application, see all the libraries that's linked to, and then load those up on to your file system,. and there's absolutely no application rewriting whatever.
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
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