[riobard]

A few years ago I invested in a small startup called `hyper.sh`. It open sourced a container runtime called `runV` which provided exactly this: security of virtual machines plus convenience of containers.

The project later merged with Intel Clear Container to become what's now called Kata Containers (https://katacontainers.io/) and is now widely used by several Internet giants like Alibaba and Baidu.

The startup was acquired by Ant Finance a couple of years ago.

(I recorded a podcast with one of hyper.sh engineer if you can listen to Mandarin https://pan.icu/25)

[temp_praneshp]

Probably off topic: Back in 2014-15 at my first job, when I was working on openstack, they used to show up at the summits. They were super smart and very generous with their time when I had questions. I wondered sometime in 2020 what happened to them, I'm happy they had a decent exit.

[XorNot]

I used runV with drone.io (on top of Media) to run distributed on-demand VM builders for GitHub enterprise (we were building physical machine images to deploy so needed VM isolation).

It actually worked great, and I've struggled to get as quite a flexible CI system at other jobs since then (the big advantage was it looked like Docker, so with compose you could either spin a metal-like nested VM or just pull in some DB containers in your build instance).

[cptnapalm]

I was looking at Kata containers a few days ago. I'm pretty new to trying to use VMs/containers for services; purely hobby level. Couldn't figure out how to use them, but that's not necessarily a knock on them as I also can't get OpenBSD wireguard to work either.

[polskibus]

How does it differ from Firecracker?

[riobard]

I'm not familiar with later development, but AFAIK Firecracker came much later and now you can actually use Firecracker as Kata Container's hypervisor in addition to QEMU.

[lifty]

I worked with their tech, testing it, and I loved the product. It was definitely ahead of its time. Similar in some ways to what Fly is doing these days, without the edge.