Using Unikernels in Production Today

A talk given at Scale15X in Pasadena, CA - Using Unikernel In Production Today not only dispels rumors surrounding {debugging, security, etc.} but shows the attendee how they can start using the ecosystem immediately.

Unikernels are being ran in production environments today not just by startups but by large companies. In this talk we'll show how your company can get started in this ecosystem with your existing software.

Unikernels offer tremendous promise but also many challenges exist as most workflows need to change to fully utilize them. Simple tasks such as testing become challenging as old world workflows don't work anymore. Even things such as migrating databases or deploying new code require new tools as simple utilites such as a shell don't exist. Changing workflows means changing tooling so we'll go into a deep dive of the different toolsets and frameworks available today for developing, testing and deploying unikernels.

Transcript

1. Using Unikernels in Production Today SCALE 15X github.com/deferpanic/virgo
2. “Unikernels are not here now”
3. “Unikernels are not ready for Production”
4. Have you booted a unikernel?
5. NO
6. Have you compiled a unikernel?
7. NO
8. Do You Even Engineer?
9. NO
10. linux conference?
12. Whose Using Unikernels?
19. many other companies than I can (and can’t) list…. Star Lab IncludeOS Galois Cloudozer
20. A WhirlWind Tour of Debugging
24. gdb
28. Lets Talk Security
30. Spoken at numerous security conventions since 2000.
31. Worked for Multiple Security Companies
32. Got In Trouble As A Teenager for Defacing Websites
33. No Shell? No Shellcode?
34. If you can’t pop shell then mass hacking is not easy
35. if you can’t mass hack how do you build a botnet?
36. Some Stuff You Might’ve Missed
37. Can you spin up 1000 VMs and spin them down again in a matter of minutes?
43. Dan Williams is working on integrating solo5 w/ native OSX hypervisor API
44. Real Life Suckery
46. 9.5.3
47. /* comment out everything */ step 1
48. elog(LOG, "before backend"); step 2
49. pid_t pid = fork(); step 3
50. err = pthread_create(&(tid[i]), NULL, &doSomeThing, NULL); step 4
51. PostMaster Setups Shared Memory
52. shared memory semaphores shared libraries multiple processes signals forking --> threads (IPC) inter process communication System V IPC
53. None of this makes sense for a single process and single address space system.
54. Other Systems that Don’t Fork() ?
56. internal_forkexec backend_forkexec
57. Code Dumpster Diving Due to backward compatibility concerns the replication parameter is a hybrid beast which allows the value to be either boolean or the string 'database'. https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/ 19dc233c32f2900e57b8da4f41c0f662ab42e080/src/backend/ postmaster/postmaster.c#L2081-L2084
58. S S L
60. What's a hacker to do?
61. That’s right, Hack
62. Let’s Build Something
63. github.com/ deferpanic/ virgo
68. Level 1 Dependencies
69. Level 2 Dependencies
70. Level 3 (env) Dependencies
71. Compilation
72. http://downloads.sourceforge.net/ tuntaposx/tuntap_20150118.tar.gz sudo kextstat | grep tap tuntap
73. pfctl nat on en0 from tap1:network to any -> (en0)
75. ugly panda bear
77. Public Cloud?
78. 1G volume?
79. Hell No
80. No L2 Networking?
81. That Sucks
82. resource aware scheduling? 4 cores 32G 4 cores 8G 2 cores 8G 2 cores 8G 2 cores 16G 4 cores 8G 2 cores 8G host 1 host N
83. nope
84. share similar problems/benefits with containers
85. share similar problems/ benefits with VMs
86. workflows
87. configuration management
89. volume deploy workflow
90. mount base volume
92. database migration workflow
94. should we be calling unikernels something different?
95. what will you build?
96. example 1 STATIC HTML
97. example 2 RUBY/RAILS
98. example 3 FS Explorer