The Firecracker virtual machine monitor

Posted Jan 5, 2019 19:03 UTC (Sat) by k8to (guest, #15413)
In reply to: The Firecracker virtual machine monitor by niner
Parent article: The Firecracker virtual machine monitor

Serverless is a sales pitch. Amazon and others tell you that you won't have to think about servers (or vms) anymore. People like this sales pitch.

The interface offered is that you define some hosted functions that interact with each other and the cloud vendor's system services the execute "somewhere" when they get messages /traffic /invoked. How they actually currently run its packaged as a container/vm that gets started when in use and paused or offlined when not. That's not a hard guarantee. Someone could design a multitenanted serverless platform, but typically getting lightweight benefits from that means designing for a particular language runtime, and that hasn't been popular historically.

In reality you trade off problem sets in such a world. You reduce your initial ops costs and gain some need to finesse the vendor platform to avoid stalls. You lose the need to carefully avoid adding unwanted state, but you also lose access to your familiar debugging tools.

The Firecracker virtual machine monitor

Posted Jan 5, 2019 20:45 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> You lose the need to carefully avoid adding unwanted state, but you also lose access to your familiar debugging tools.
You can run AWS Lambdas locally for debugging. Remote debugging is indeed more complicated, you can't just SSH into the server and see what's going on there. But on the other hand, you need much less of it - as there's much less infrastructure that you manage.