Ask HN: VM hosting that could start under a second?

1 point·punkpeye··11 comments

I have a use case that requires starting a VM (or Docker image, though less ideal) in under a few seconds, using a pre-setup image.

I need to run them for 1-2 minutes and then kill them, i.e. looking for a hosting provider that charges in small increments (seconds or minutes).

What are my options?

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This could be a fit for serverless frameworks. AWS Lambda and similar frameworks can help you with such usecases. Take a look at Firecracker VM and microVM space.

https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/

containers are the only thing that start that fast. google cloud and azure allow you to create and destroy vms via api and both allow you to use your own base images, i know this much because an colleague currently is setting up an web ui for internal customers.

Re GCP VMs with base image, do you know how long it takes to boot them?

Typically less than 30s depending on the underlying image size. Their CloudRun product is probably a better fit for the needs you described, super fast boot times, container based, easy scaling

CloudRun looks promising!

It depends. With systemd usually a minute, but we have other workloads, so its not comparable. containers are a lot faster, since some steps can be skipped, like ip addresses and other things. Google uses kvm and probably libvirt for the vms, so you can test it localy before.

At the same speed as the on-premise vms.the difference because of cloud-init is minimal.

https://fly.io/blog/fly-machines/

Woah! This is _exactly_ what I was looking for :party:

This service is insane :mind_blown:

Pre-warm spots on aws and kill/propagate as needed and your bill will be a sine wave

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