alt Hacker NewsThe Azure Upstream team has been working on a really fast hypervisor library written in Rust for the past three years. It does less than you'd conventionally do with hypervisors, but in turn it can start VMs around 2 orders of magnitude faster (around 1-2ms/VM).
I think this is really cool, and the library was just released on GitHub for anyone to try. I’m happy I got to help them write their announcement post — and I figured this might be interesting for folks here!
Do you think requiring to use their packages is too limiting for widespread usage? Seems like you're forced to use Rust or C atm.
This seems like a limitation that sits in a somewhat unusable place: For something simple and platform-specific (e.g. a HTTP transform) we can just use JS where the boot time perf makes up for the execution perf, and for something more serious like a full-fledged API 120ms should be more than enough time (and we can preemtively scale as long as we're not already at 0)