Use firecracker microvms

potentialstyx

Describe your feature request: Don't use lame docker use firecracker
What problem(s) would this feature solve? firecracker is cooler, and lets users have root (without it being a security issue)
Explain what you were trying to do when you came across the problem leading to this feature request: N/A

Bost

potentialstyx For Node we're using WebContainers, Python probably Pyodide, etc.

Bost

potentialstyx use firecracker

We will probably do this

Fairies0feast

Bost Why don't you just use Docker Py or something because WebContainers can't support lots of resources.

potentialstyx

Bost so like no hosting at all?

cldprv

Bost Why not use Google’s spots vms, they are cheap, as low as $1.18/month, and have a lot of capacity.

Bost

My bad @cldprv @Fairies0feast @potentialstyx I meant for development, sure for hosting we can

cldprv use Google’s spots vms

cldprv

Bost But… That will be quite limiting, and slow to load, incompatible with slow computers, … You will not be able to do as much things as you can do with Replit + you will not be able to support all languages. That’s why I said Google Spot vms, they are cheap, you can install nixos on them(support for all languages), it’s good for cheap(maybe not very reliable) always on and good for development. It’s like $0.002/hour

Bost

cldprv but all that for development?

reesericci

Honestly, we should use containers with Kubernetes for orchestration. We can then use the k8s API for managing the containers & networking. https://kubernetes.io

Bost

reesericci that's a lot of edits :kekw: but I do agree (I think, idrk what any of that means lol)

reesericci

It's def a complicated system with a large learning curve but it's the best way to manage containers at scale

grimsteel

While WebContainers definitely are limited (can only run things compiled to wasm, like node and python), they work great for development for now. They don't cost anything for us to run.

As for firecracker (actual vms) vs some form of containers (docker + kubernetes) this all depends on where we're hosting this stuff. Firecracker is more suited for bare-metal machines (IIRC GCP does support nested kvm but I'm really not familiar with all of this stuff)

Bost

grimsteel for hosting we considered google spot vms

would we need real servers for development?

cldprv

I think for development we should also use Google spot VMs with a modified and lightweight version of NixOS on them.

Bost

So 100% free static hosting, and then 100% free serverless hosting with Firecracker, and then the super cheap spot vms hosting for dedicated vm?