How we enabled ARM64 VMs | Hacker News Reader

How we enabled ARM64 VMs

ubicloud.com

90 pointsozgune17 comments

Ubicloud is such a good idea. There's no reason why the major cloud providers need be considered more than data center providers. AWS 'bare metal' instances should be priced as a commodity, just as the data centers it used to rent space from are. OSS software can and should do pretty much everything above that layer, with room for commercially licensed software as well, of course.

> There's no reason why the major cloud providers need be considered more than data center providers

They have no incentive to do this or to offer low cost bare metal instances. If anything, the opposite incentive exists in my experience: make these instances extremely expensive and push everyone to cheaper, locked in managed services. Because surely anyone that needs bare metal has fat stacks of cash?!

Making public cloud a commodity kills the major public cloud providers valuation, IMO.

That's what we should hope projects like Ubicloud can provide, a way for the mid-tier providers that would've done PHP-hosting 10-15 years ago to have a competitive and _portable_ service offering.

If you just need compute then big cloud doesn't really make sense. You're paying a huge premium for the lego block like ecosystem

Not exactly. The use-cases suitable for public IaaS are:

0. Temporary prototypes

1. Overflow capacity

2. One-time jobs

It's also often used to evade local IT restrictions. In general, public IaaS is damn expensive and a waste of money for continuous, predictable workloads regardless of compute, storage, and/or networking usage.

Those would all work just fine on mid tier providers like digital ocean

Which lack the marketing and sales capability because they are a lot cheaper.

I found this article on their IAM/ABAC service interesting: https://www.ubicloud.com/docs/architecture/attribute-based-a...

I always wonder how the big cloud providers manage to scale their IAM services (from a distributed systems perspective) given they presumably need both low latency and some reasonable level of consistency. Anyone have any pointers to architectural descriptions/publications?

Amazon has open sourced their policy engine https://github.com/cedar-policy/cedar

Cedar is not the policy engine used by AWS IAM. Other AWS services do use it, though: https://www.cedarpolicy.com/en/integrations

Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System

https://research.google/pubs/zanzibar-googles-consistent-glo...

Thanks, this looks interesting.

Wouldn't a geo-replicated single-primary DB suffice? Reads would have low-latency, and only writes would pay for the latency to reach the primary far away.

In the article, mentioned Linux is mentioned as the underlying OS. Wonder what approach Ubicloud takes (if any) to have actual diversity in the software stack for the purpose of reliability and security. My assumption here being, that different OSes, while increasing the attack vector also make it more likely that the whole fleet is not susceptible to the same software problem or vulnerability at roughly the same time. Just something I started pondering about after seeing Hetzner, which is quite popular in the BSD land.

There's not many people/projects/companies that take this approach; so if they're not telling you about doing it, you can safely assume they aren't.

IMHO, it's a nice idea, but it at least doubles your system integration work, and the benefits are mostly hypothetical, unless you're willing and able to dynamically shift your infrastructure between OSes if one of them usually performs better but is susceptible to some DoS that's inbound today.

Seems like the opposite is also true. Diversity of operating systems / approaches results in more chances of making a mistake.

The idea is to have something like biodiversity so one virus doesn't wash you. Software systems tend to trade redundancy away for efficiency

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