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anurag 9 hours ago

This is a big deal because you can now run Firecracker/other microVMs in an AWS VM instead of expensive AWS bare-metal instances.

GCP has had nested virtualization for a while.

Twirrim 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

OCI supports it with Intel. I know it works with AMD, but we don't officially support that so far as I'm aware. The performance hit on AMD is bigger than Intel, last I looked.

firesteelrain 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Azure has had nested virt available for a while too. I used to run HyperV in cloud

direwolf20 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can use an expensive AWS VM instead of an expensive AWS bare–metal image. Does anyone realise how expensive AWS is, even in the best case?

PunchyHamster 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It is expensive. But the point where it stops being expensive is far above most companies use case. If you're paying less than a developers salary for hosting you most likely won't see all that many benefits from moving.

Renting a server from cheaper hosting providers can be massive savings but you now need to re-invent all of the AWS APIs you use or might use and it's big CAPEX time investment. And any new feature you need, whether that's queue, mail gateway or thousand other APIs need to be deployed and managed first before you can even start testing.

It's less work now than it was before just due to amount of tools there are to automate it but it's still more work that you could be spending on improving your product.

notyourwork 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Agreed. Some threads make the suggestion you replied to and seemingly fail to ignore the reality of business. Not all businesses want to insource all problems.

re-thc an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> but you now need to re-invent all of the AWS APIs you use or might use and it's big CAPEX time investment

Or maybe you just never needed most of these in the first place. People got into this "AWS" mentality like it is the only way to do things. Everything had to be in a queue, event driven etc.

I'd argue not using AWS means simplifying things and it'll be less expensive not just in server cost but developer time.

parhamn 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

whats the ~ perf hit of something like this?

largbae 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Nowadays nested just wastes the extra operating system overhead and I/O performance if your VM doesn't have paravirtualization drivers installed. CPUs all have hardware support.

otterley 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As a practical matter, anywhere from 5-15%.

iJohnDoe 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Was hoping this comment would be here. Firecracker and microVMs are good use-case. Also, being able to simply test and develop is a nice to have.

Nested virtualization can mean a lot of things. Not just full VMs.

HumanOstrich 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Firecracker and microVMs are good use-case.

Good use-case for what?

sorenbs an hour ago | parent | next [-]

We operate a postgres service on Firecracker. You can create as many databases as you want, and we memory-snapshot them after 5 seconds of inactivity, and spin them up again in 50ms when a query arrives.

https://www.prisma.io/postgres

adobrawy 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Nowadays universal answer for "what? why?" is AI. AI agent needs VMs to run generated code in sandbox as they can not be trusted.

HumanOstrich 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think everyone should assume that AI is the answer to all questions. I was asking the person I replied to, thanks.