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by bogomipz 3659 days ago
Can someone explain why these rump kernels can not be run on AWS if deferpanic has Xen as a target? AWS is Xen-based. I understand that there currently isn't a target for Docker so that takes Google Cloud out of the equation. The following two statement seem to be contradictory:

Can I use Google Cloud or AWS? You could - although you won’t write much more than a toy app - not until things are changed.

DeferPanic offers managed services for both public and private cloud environments and it's platform targets KVM, Xen, bare metal, and ESX.

Perhaps that falls under the "unfit"statement about these Cloud provider but that seem pretty nebulous for a such a technical discussion.
2 comments
jsolson 3659 days ago
> I understand that there currently isn't a target for Docker so that takes Google Cloud out of the equation.

Google Compute Engine runs a lot more than just Docker images. It allows you to run arbitrary x86 VMs, just like EC2. It is not based on Xen, however (it is a combination of KVM and a non-QEMU VMM about which I wish I could say a whole lot more, but I don't think we're prepared to do that just now).

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bogomipz 3659 days ago
Right I believe that GCE is docker but it runs in a KVM container, I'm not sure why they do that however. Maybe someone else can explain? My guess would be that its a hedge on container security.

However what they hand you is a docker container I believe so provided there's docker target for whatever rump kernel it should theoretically just work. No?

It sounds like you work on GCE?

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jsolson 3658 days ago
GCE is just plain old VMs, no Docker involved.

There's also GKE which is managed Kubernetes complete with Docker containers.

(And yes, I work on the virtual machine monitor backing GCE)

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andrewstuart 3659 days ago
Unikernels run fine on AWS.

It's just that it's a bit fiddly to make it happen. My guess is that it's the fiddliness that Ian is suggesting is impractical.

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