Thank you for the kind words my friend. I enjoyed contributing to TinyKVM during my time at Varnish Software. It is nice to see that you are able to present and share it with the community.
codethief 2 hours ago [-]
In case anyone from Varnish is around, possibly even the author himself: Last time we discussed TinyKVM here, I wanted to know[0] whether it could possibly be used as an OCI container runtime and what capabilities it would need? Background: I would like to use it as a runtime in order to allow for nesting containers in my CI pipelines, which is difficult with standard OCI runtimes like runc/crun without granting them privileges or at least additional capabilities that AppArmor is not happy about. Anyway, I'd still be very much interested in an answer! :)
As I understand it TinyKVM is so fast because it does not run a full Linux guest but rather a thin layer with just enough syscall compatibility to run single threaded Linux static binaries.
These posts from Varnish initially confused me because the only Varnish project I had heard of was a cache/accelerator like nginx.
TinyKVM is an impressive marvel and I wonder if it would help to separate the branding from the older name.
CoolCold 6 hours ago [-]
Nowadays I almost have zero intersection with Varnish - my own impression it was much more popular like 10 years ago or even more.
I know couple of frameworks/systems support it, especially in php world.
Looks like that it's lost in layers - dev guys don't care much, sysadmins are sort of extincted, noone to bother to add Varnish into request processing queue. Needless to say, people ok HN even complain on Nginx configs,while for base caching it's much simpler, from my perspective.
pbowyer 2 hours ago [-]
I borderline love Varnish cache, but the way the open source and commercial versions have diverged and all the nice features only go into the $10k/yr+ commercial version sucks.
Features like the memory governer [0], because trying to predict how much memory (open-source) Varnish will use is an absolute PITA and a sure-fire way to run out of memory if you're not careful.
My clients can't justify the commercial license costs (as a sibling comment says, CDNs eat Varnish's lunch in that market) and yet what I can do with Varnish and the power it gives me makes it real magic.
It would be nice to see a modern reimplementation of Varnish, open-sourced, but I doubt that would ever happen.
It competes with CDNs, is the problem- once you use one, they take care of the caching, and you don't need to run your own. People with global customers need a CDN, and they're to cheap to build your own.
atonse 4 hours ago [-]
I had to scale a high profile Wordpress site during the pandemic. It got huge spikes daily during a press conference. It got 150k hits per second.
Apart from moving it from windows to Linux, I put it in front of varnish and spent a few hours tweaking the config to make sure everything still worked. It was my first time using varnish so it took longer.
It performed flawlessly for years.
Varnish was a real workhorse.
jesterson 5 hours ago [-]
Varnish is amazing. Nowadays people blow up projects with kubernetes, JS frameworks, million other tools, while the same can be achieved with varnish+nginx with much less efforts.
Twirrim 3 hours ago [-]
Don't forget all those interconnected microservices, so that every request has to be handled by dozens of machines with lots of json flying everywhere eating up CPU time that could have been spent actually carrying out the business logic instead.
Imustaskforhelp 6 hours ago [-]
Great post as usual!
Tinykvm is going to be the future
johnbellone 3 hours ago [-]
This is pretty damn sweet.
d0100 6 hours ago [-]
I am looking for a Deno sandbox and this seems like a good idea.
Is there code available anywhere of this implementation?
Thank you for the kind words my friend. I enjoyed contributing to TinyKVM during my time at Varnish Software. It is nice to see that you are able to present and share it with the community.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43364218
I’ve been running varnish/tinykvm using podman by using passing /dev/kvm into the container and adding myself to the kvm group. https://github.com/lrowe/deno_varnish?tab=readme-ov-file#run...
Maybe you would be better off with something like krun which is built to run OCI containers in a full Linux kvm guest. https://josecastillolema.github.io/podman-wasm-libkrun/
[0]: https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox
TinyKVM is an impressive marvel and I wonder if it would help to separate the branding from the older name.
I know couple of frameworks/systems support it, especially in php world.
Looks like that it's lost in layers - dev guys don't care much, sysadmins are sort of extincted, noone to bother to add Varnish into request processing queue. Needless to say, people ok HN even complain on Nginx configs,while for base caching it's much simpler, from my perspective.
Features like the memory governer [0], because trying to predict how much memory (open-source) Varnish will use is an absolute PITA and a sure-fire way to run out of memory if you're not careful.
My clients can't justify the commercial license costs (as a sibling comment says, CDNs eat Varnish's lunch in that market) and yet what I can do with Varnish and the power it gives me makes it real magic.
It would be nice to see a modern reimplementation of Varnish, open-sourced, but I doubt that would ever happen.
0. https://info.varnish-software.com/blog/two-minute-tech-tuesd...
Apart from moving it from windows to Linux, I put it in front of varnish and spent a few hours tweaking the config to make sure everything still worked. It was my first time using varnish so it took longer.
It performed flawlessly for years.
Varnish was a real workhorse.
Tinykvm is going to be the future
Is there code available anywhere of this implementation?
It's very much still a work-in-progress. But it works!
The main plugin repo is here: https://github.com/varnish/libvmod-tinykvm