I have been following ZeroVM since it's inception and often go to the website and stare longingly at my screen thinking of amazing things it could do (when coupled with OpenStack Swift to make "ZeroCloud"). If you look at my HN comment history you can see multiple articles about "serverless" where I tried to tell people about ZeroVM.
But they got bought by Rackspace (who originally open sourced Swift) in late 2013, and then their github account activity dropped to 0 by early 2015. Rackspace has probably one of the worlds largest Swift deployments, so maybe one day they will do some cool things with ZeroVM ala ZeroCloud but for now the forward movement of the project seems dead or at least proprietary :(
Other interesting implementations of the same concept include Joyents Manta, which is also open source and actually probably more flexible than ZeroCloud (you can SSH into your container).
Yeah the lack of further work on ZeroVM is unfortunate. You may be interested in https://github.com/openstack/storlets which is conceptually similar and is being actively developed.
I knew some of the devs (they were in the same TechStars Cloud group as the last company I worked for). Brilliant team that lost the wind in their sails after the acquisition.
Thanks for posting that. It was the exact question in my mind.
For anyone who's worked with it, does the fact that it's pure userspace have any negatives? Performance? What about access to system resources, opening sockets, etc.
Then it's Software Fault Isolation (SFI) rather than a VM if it's NaCl-based. Sounds like just a bad, naming choice far as comprehensibility goes. Anyone curious about such tech can Google for that phrase plus "security" and "pdf." Throw in word "survey" for at least one paper with a summary of old methods.
I have always been a fan of ZeroVM. I had decided to take the task of adding multi-threaded support so that we'd have NaCL-enforced security and performance constraints, rather than depending upon the Linux kernel for the same. This turned out to be more complex for my skill levels and I gave up mid-way.
I recommend that you try out ZeroVM for your Python apps. I've seen great demos where Rackspace devs applied on-the-fly transformations to content being served from swift. e.g. one demo added watermarks to files, another transcoded video streams.
At a ZeroVM workshop in Atlanta at the OpenStack summit some years ago, one of the participants started a discussion with the ZeroVM devs about running ZeroVM apps via the firmware of SSD drives.
Unfortunately, this nice technology didn't quite catch on.
ZeroVM reduces the accepted X86 instructions and also restricts more syscalls than Google NaCl.
Per Google's NaCl devs, NaCl's restrictions result in an average of 10% drop in performance, though it's application specific. ZeroVM should result in slightly greater drop in performance given its restrictions.
To make this project viable they would have to re-build it around WebAssembly[1] instead. NaCl was conceived before WebAssembly emerged as the standard for binary executables for the web and is now in maintenance mode.
[+] [-] blorgle|9 years ago|reply
But they got bought by Rackspace (who originally open sourced Swift) in late 2013, and then their github account activity dropped to 0 by early 2015. Rackspace has probably one of the worlds largest Swift deployments, so maybe one day they will do some cool things with ZeroVM ala ZeroCloud but for now the forward movement of the project seems dead or at least proprietary :(
Other interesting implementations of the same concept include Joyents Manta, which is also open source and actually probably more flexible than ZeroCloud (you can SSH into your container).
[+] [-] notmyname|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sriku|9 years ago|reply
Thanks for the pointer to Manta.
[+] [-] saryant|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thepumpkin1979|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluejekyll|9 years ago|reply
For anyone who's worked with it, does the fact that it's pure userspace have any negatives? Performance? What about access to system resources, opening sockets, etc.
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trapperkeeper79|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] qznc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solarengineer|9 years ago|reply
I recommend that you try out ZeroVM for your Python apps. I've seen great demos where Rackspace devs applied on-the-fly transformations to content being served from swift. e.g. one demo added watermarks to files, another transcoded video streams.
At a ZeroVM workshop in Atlanta at the OpenStack summit some years ago, one of the participants started a discussion with the ZeroVM devs about running ZeroVM apps via the firmware of SSD drives.
Unfortunately, this nice technology didn't quite catch on.
[+] [-] valarauca1|9 years ago|reply
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=239656...
[+] [-] mankash666|9 years ago|reply
Per Google's NaCl devs, NaCl's restrictions result in an average of 10% drop in performance, though it's application specific. ZeroVM should result in slightly greater drop in performance given its restrictions.
[+] [-] newsat13|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zimbatm|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://webassembly.org/
[+] [-] throwaway91111|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] floatboth|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fourthark|9 years ago|reply