NanoVMs Let You Run Your Apps Faster and Safer with Unikernels

Ian Eyberg talks about Unikernels and how he built one with C. Their site is built with Golang and hosted on GCP / their own datacenter.

In this episode of Running in Production, Ian Eyberg goes over creating a
Unikernel with C as well as host a few sites supporting his tool with Go. It’s
hosted on Google Cloud and their own data center. Nanos has been available since
2020.

Ian talks about what a Unikernel is, their open source tools and how they
manage their own services. This episode has a healthy mix between background
knowledge on Unikernels and how they (as a company) set up their
infrastructure.

It’s worth pointing out you can run your existing applications in a Unikernel
without having to change how it’s written and they support running them on most
major hosting providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean, your own hardware,
etc.).

Topics Include

1:44 – What is a Unikernel? How is it different than a traditional VM or container?
7:58 – There’s a free and open source tool and an optional SAAS offering
10:07 – How it’s possible to build a new deployable golden image in 2 minutes
12:12 – Motivation to use Go for building the surrounding sites and services
16:51 – Certain organizations are pushing decent traffic through their Unikernel driven apps
19:02 – How you can run a multi-service app with Nanos (web + worker + db + cache, etc.)
22:59 – ops.city and nanos.org are a single Go binary / 1 Unikernel driven app
25:37 – The nanovms.com site is a bit more involved and has Stripe integration
28:08 – I never heard of the term Unikernel until today
30:20 – nginx isn’t sitting in front of the Go app and how Unikernels can be so fast
40:29 – With a Unikernel approach you can easily move between hosting providers
44:23 – SSL certs are handled directly by the Go app for their sites
49:56 – nanos.org and ops.city use GCP and nanovms.com is on their own hardware
54:26 – Why they went with their own data center for hosting and their server specs / costs
1:02:02 – Terraform, Ansible and similar tools aren’t being used to set up anything
1:04:21 – What the deployment process looks like for their services
1:10:40 – You can run all of this on a Raspberry Pi 4
1:13:15 – What does the development process look like with a Unikernel driven app?
1:16:21 – Dealing with secrets in production
1:17:55 – Databases are backed up regularly and how logs are handled
1:23:52 – Getting notified of errors and up-time reports from updown.io
1:25:52 – Mailgun is used for sending out transactional emails
1:26:45 – Best tips? Keep it simple (seriously)
1:30:05 – Thoughts on the Plan9 operating system
1:34:06 – You don’t need to change how you write your apps to run them in a Unikernel
1:40:07 – The code for Nanos is open source on GitHub

Links

📄 References

https://ops.city/
https://nanos.org/
https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/
https://deepdiscountservers.com/
https://he.net/
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257

⚙️ Tech Stack

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🛠 Libraries Used

https://github.com/gorilla/mux

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