Personally I still think this is not enough, and we really need full generalized (not AI-only) microvm support built into docker/podman, like yesterday.

Currently it's difficult to even get a hold of a properly configured minimal kernel (or time-consuming to try to build one) and all the right command-line incantations to even start a one-off microvm using say, qemu, with all the proper storage/networking/etc. bits one needs for production environments. Plus you need to keep that kernel updated very regularly.

I know there's projects like smolvm that try to make this simpler, but I've had some major problems with those solutions as well, and I just feel like the big boys need to step up and support this directly by now.

I have been following https://github.com/superradcompany/microsandbox a bit, very simple to get started with at least

this has already been done.

runsc (gvisor)

Kata Containers (virtualization)

both drop in replacements for runc (default OCI runtime)

there are others too. one based on libkrun : https://github.com/containers/crun/blob/main/krun.1.md

and these are just runc replacements.

with some minor scripting you can roll a CLI solution using any of gvisor, cloud-hypervisor, firecracker, muvm (libkrun).

Containers and security are oxymorons. The flood of page cache cves (which can always be escalated/weaponized to an escape) from the other month is making deploying containers to prod untenable.

As for orchestration - a lot of folks think you need a completely new orchestration system for dealing with vms but we just simply re-use the existing infrastructure that already exists - the public clouds. Those companies have tens of thousands of engineers that are much better than the average engineer at this stuff, custom hardware, custom protocols and close to several decades of existing deployment.

I can build and ship a vm from my laptop/ci to prod on AWS/GCP in ~tens of second. Granted I come from the camp that thinks deploying full blown general purpose operating systems to prod is an increasingly incredibly risky practice.

Maybe this here helps (I have not tried yet): https://github.com/virtkit-dev/virtkit