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Comment by riobard | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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).

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.

How does it differ from Firecracker?

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.

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.

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