Tool To Try: How I read news and why Firecracker is great one
There are some rules of thumb I read in ReWork. In my interpretation, it becomes something like advise to not record all feature requests from users. If a particular feature is important — more and more people would request it and you would remember it. Pretty good approach if you have good support overall, otherwise, you aren’t so sophisticated, you are an oblivious moron who doesn’t listen to your clients. But that another story. The same logic is applicable to news and releases. Most press releases and products would reach you only if there huge marketing company behind it. That is the reason why there are a lot of buzz words and not a lot of logic behind it.
Another approach, a very difficult one, is to immerse yourself in the environment where a lot of experts and engineers are sharing news and thoughts (believe me, that environment isn’t Facebook). And here, where advice makes sense.
Don’t read news about the product if at least a few different trusted sources would write something about it
The first time I read about Firecracker in the Rust community. It sounds like another attempt to rewrite something that already exists because “we can”. I don’t like such reasoning, so I ignored it.
Then, a few weeks ago, Adrian Colyer wrote an article about it. That different story, Andrian and his “ the morning paper” is one of the few blogs that I’m really reading in the last few years. The blog “the morning paper” often concentrating on big papers for very specific problems that most people would never faced. In spite of this, Andrian converts this boring papers into a simplified and very entertaining versions. Because of that, I do recommend starting reading his version “ Firecracker: lightweight virtualization for serverless applications” as the first article you should read after this one. In my case, I ignored it one more time, but I save it into “read later”.
And at last few days ago, engineers from Talos Systems tweet this:
That was the moment when I decided that it is worth an investment to read and try it.
First reason, many independent experts invested their time and effort into writing about it. The second reason, more important, companies investing in the support and development of this solution.
So this week “Tool To Try” is …
Firecracker is an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant container and function-based services.
Short version of solution:
The main component of Firecracker is a virtual machine monitor (VMM) that uses the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) to create and run microVMs.
The long version called “ Firecracker: Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Applications” and I do recommend to use as the source of truth.
Originally published at https://www.notion.so.
