
Are any cloud hosts capable of millisecond scale instance boot? - andrewstuart
I&#x27;m thinking unikernel style execution of instances, starting up in milliseconds and perhaps running only for a few thousand millseconds before being shut down.<p>It would be good if Google or AWS or DigitalOcean or Azure had such plans.<p>The pricing would need to match - not much use running an instance (or thousands of instances) for 300 milliseconds and being charged for an hour for each instance.<p>It don&#x27;t want to use containers - don&#x27;t need em, don&#x27;t need the complexity.<p>As AWS is doing nothing here maybe this is where Google or Microsoft can start to differentiate.
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wmf
No, and this is the Achilles heel of unikernels; they're totally at the mercy
of cloud provider roadmaps. And now that serverless exists, cloud providers
have even less incentive to support unikernels properly.

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zurn
Does Amazon or GCE support nested hypervisors?

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wmf
I don't know, but when people talk about the reduced overhead from unikernels
or containers I doubt nested hypervisors is what they had in mind.

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nickpsecurity
I've seen it done in networking apps:

[http://cnp.neclab.eu/clickos/](http://cnp.neclab.eu/clickos/)

I doubt anyone is doing it in normal clouds right now, though. The L4
microkernels and L4Linux work might be worth looking into for people
interested in foundations for building such things. The TUDOS demo could
almost load instances as fast as I could click them on an older computer. That
probably wasn't even very optimized given it's an academic prototype by
academics that run through all kinds of prototypes and designs.

