Someone else mentioned this in a different comment, but there was very much a link to firecracker in the article.
That - and all the other many tools that you would deploy vms to the public cloud today of which there are numerous production quality options out there.
Lastly, this is precisely the point I was trying to address with the "I'm honestly curious - what are the alternatives?" paragraph.
You could say Lambda is the orchestration layer for Firecracker but it's based on the serverless/FaaS model that's a lot more restrictive than containers.
Oh - I'm not saying that Lambda is what I'd personally choose, although there definitely seems to be quite a few people that do like it.
As mentioned in the article - the base unit of compute on public cloud is the virtual machine so there are quite a few tools out there to deploy those. Some microvm implementations out there won't boot straight off AWS/GCE but many including Nanos do. It takes ~2min to deploy && boot most applications we are running on GCE - AWS is a bit longer (but I could see that changing in the future). Note - in this case you are actually uploading the entire image - if you are just spinning up/down than it's much much faster.
Yeah, I guess it depends on your goals. Some of the unikernel people talk about VMs even smaller/cheaper than a t3.nano that start faster than any cloud can start a VM. Clearly to run such a thing you would need your own orchestration layer. Maybe that's a niche within a niche though.
I think for our general use case we are looking at people with needs that are using vms or containers today (eg: not necessarily those that want plaid speed boot-times). That's not really something we are currently optimizing for. For something like a database there would be no desire to spin up/down so fast. Also, many frameworks with heavy language vms such as JVM or ruby take a long time to boot regardless so trying to run those in a 5-10ms boot-time doesn't make a ton of sense.
Having said that, there most definitely are very very interesting projects like LightVM, http://cnp.neclab.eu/projects/lightvm/ that do target low latency and NFV would be a great use-case for projects like that.
Someone else mentioned this in a different comment, but there was very much a link to firecracker in the article.
That - and all the other many tools that you would deploy vms to the public cloud today of which there are numerous production quality options out there.
Lastly, this is precisely the point I was trying to address with the "I'm honestly curious - what are the alternatives?" paragraph.