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

https://github.com/gorilla/mux

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