Hyper – distributed Firecracker microVM orchestrator written in Elixir
Hey everyone! One of the problems I ran into is that a large part of the VM-provider ecosystem is currently paid closed-source SAAS products with varying degrees of reliability. I wanted an OSS distributed microVM orchestrator and I couldn't find one. Hyper is a distributed FirecrackerVM orchestrator written in Elixir (BEAM), with gRPC support for non-BEAM clients. Hyper is: - Distributed -- it's designed to run across a cluster of bare metal machines, and will automatically connect to other Hyper nodes. - Fast -- it builds COW layers to enable fast, localized COW forking. Cold boots happen…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey everyone! One of the problems I ran into is that a large part of the VM-provider ecosystem is currently paid closed-source SAAS products with varying degrees of reliability. I wanted an OSS distributed microVM orchestrator and I couldn't find one. Hyper is a distributed FirecrackerVM orchestrator written in Elixir (BEAM), with gRPC support for non-BEAM clients. Hyper is: - Distributed -- it's designed to run across a cluster of bare metal machines, and will automatically connect to other Hyper nodes. - Fast -- it builds COW layers to enable fast, localized COW forking. Cold boots happen within 1s. Filesystem forks take ~50ms. Forked VMs are colocated to take the fast path as much as possible. - Interactive -- like all Elixir applications, if you can connect to the cluster, you can spawn, manage, monitor and interact with VMs live in an `iex` REPL. Or, you can use the gRPC interface if your system isn't on the BEAM. - Yours -- although I developed this primarily for Harmont (which is paid), Hyper is an MIT-licensed project and will remain such. - Self-contained -- all we need is a side-car Postgres instance. - Configurable -- colocation, vmlinux options, etc. can all be customized. - Secure -- everything runs on the BEAM; a single setuid Rust helper performs the few operations that need root, keeping the privileged surface small. Fair warning: the software is still in active testing and I expect a couple more features to be added soon: - Automatic cloud provisioning -- when you run out of headroom in your cluster, you should be able to fall back to Latitude/GCP/AWS to provision more compute. - More testing -- I am currently integrating Hyper into harmont.dev and will likely run into some issues. Fuzzing is part of the roadmap. - Better docs -- I spent _some_ time working on the docs, but they're definitely not total nor ideal. Very open to feedback, critique, and/or contributions. Please open any issues on Github, or feel free to DM/email me. PS. A couple people asked how this differs from firecracker-containerd and Kata containers. Both of those projects are runtimes for managing VMs on a single node. A fair mental model for Hyper is an amalgam of firecracker-containerd and k8s.
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