Virtualization - Bruno Scheufler

Isolating user workloads and providing reproducible environments is critical in large-scale systems engineering. Virtualization offers a way to share compute resources among multiple tenants with varying levels of isolation.

May 13, 2023

Instant Linux VMs without the Installation

Typically, installing one of the major Linux distributions like Ubuntu or Debian requires going through an interactive installation wizard. This is great when you have a screen and keyboard but less ergonomic in a virtualized scenario, for example when you’re running in qemu/kvm....Systems Architecture, Containers

Apr 30, 2023

Reproducible VMs for Local Development

Lately, I’ve been exploring x86 Linux machines for building and running a Kubernetes development environment. Since I’m using an Apple Silicon MBP as my daily driver, I had to get creative and tried a couple of options ending on a pretty robust workflow I wanted to outline. Throughout the process, I noticed parallels to current trends in cloud development environments, including the benefits of easily reproducible, instant environments for effective experimentation....Systems Architecture, Containers

Nov 20, 2021

Running Untrusted Workloads with Firecracker and containerd

Firecracker was designed by AWS to run untrusted workloads in a secure environment for their Lambda and Fargate services while retaining the fast startup times and low resource overhead you expect from serverless functions and containers. Represented as microVMs, workloads deployed with Firecracker are extremely lightweight, so that a given host system can run thousands of multi-tenant VMs at a time....Containers