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We clone a running VM in 2 seconds (2022)

(codesandbox.io)
169 points hunvreus | 2 comments | 4/8/2025, 2:55:00 PM | HN request time: 0.384s | source
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pragma_x ◴[4/11/2025, 2:31:00 PM] No.43654222[source]▶

I'm starting to see a pattern here. This describes a technology that rapidly deploys "VM" instances in the cloud which support things like Lambda and single-process containers. At what point do we scale this all back to a more rudimentary OS that provides security and process management across multiple physical machines? Or is there already a Linux distro that does this?

I ask because watching cloud providers like AWS slowly reinvent mainframes just seems like the painful way around.

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no_wizard ◴[4/11/2025, 2:35:00 PM] No.43654263[source]▶

EDIT: leaving the answer, but I simply misinterpreted what they meant. This isn't the same thing

BSD has had jails for a long time, which let you achieve isolation on a system in this manner, or at least close to it.

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1. hedora ◴[4/11/2025, 3:18:00 PM] No.43654811[source]▶

They’re missing multi-machine orchestration: Run thousands of jails on these dozen machines. Don’t bother me with the details at runtime.

They are also missing an ergonomic tool like dockerfiles. The following file, plus a cli tool for “run N copies on my M machines” should be enough to run bsd in prod, and it is not:

“FROM openbsd:latest ; CMD pkg -i apache ; echo “apache=enabled >> /etc/rc.defaults ; COPY public_html /var/www/ ; CMD init”

I don’t think writing the tooling would be that difficult, but it was missing the last time I looked.

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2. no_wizard ◴[4/11/2025, 3:46:00 PM] No.43655175[source]▶

I think I may have simply misinterpreted what you meant. You're right, its not Dockerfile-esque easy