Do You Need a Data Center?

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.

• Dive into Docker is a video course that takes you from not knowing what Docker is to being able to confidently use Docker and Docker Compose for your own apps. Long gone are the days of "but it works on my machine!". A bunch of follow along labs are included.

• Build a SAAS App with Flask is a video course where we build a real world SAAS app that accepts payments, has a custom admin, includes high test coverage and goes over how to implement and apply 50+ common web app features. There's over 20+ hours of video.