What's the Difference Between Containers and Unicornals?

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

• golang →
• aws →
• circle-ci →
• gcp →
• mailgun →
• s3 →
• stripe →
• updownio →
• webpack →

🛠 Libraries Used

• https://github.com/gorilla/mux

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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