Ditch That AWS Build Host

Page content

In honor of the transnational strike on Amazon this week, here are instructions for moving your AWS unikernels to a cloud that used to claim it wasn’t evil. You might also be interested in establishing a picket line for your packets.

This blog originally ran on Amazon EC2. Since early 2017, it’s been running on a different tech behemoth’s massive public cloud. The deployment process is considerably easier and faster on this alternative public cloud – I first saw it as a live demo given by Michael Bright and immediately knew I wanted to replace my AWS pipeline with it. My AWS unikernel deployments required a secondary Linux host for building AMIs from a kernel image and usually took around 20 minutes from start to finish; GCP deployments can be done from my development host and take around 90 seconds.

One-time GCP Preparation

  • get the tech behemoth public cloud tools.
  • register an account at the tech behemoth’s public cloud console and start a project.
  • configure your public cloud tools to use the project you’ve started by default.
  • register a storage location for the project in the tech behemoth’s public cloud console.
  • enable billing (yikes), but be comforted in the knowledge that your use will be free for the first year
  • get a non-ephemeral public IPv4 address in the tech behemoth’s public cloud console, and point the relevant DNS records at it

Deploying a MirageOS Unikernel to GCP

  • configure your unikernel. You’ll want to use dhcp network configuration, and build for the virtio backend. Currently, that invocation looks like mirage configure -t virtio --dhcp true.
  • build your unikernel: make depend && make.
  • package your unikernel for booting: solo5-mkimage -f tar unikernel.tar.gz unikernel.virtio, replacing “unikernel” with some sensible name.
  • ship your unikernel off to tech behemoth storage: gsutil cp unikernel.tar.gz gs://my_storage_location
  • make a “compute image” based on the unikernel: gcloud compute images create this-particular-unikernel-version --source-uri gs://my_storage_location/unikernel.tar.gz (you’ll have to also pick a deployment zone)
  • start a low-resource cheap instance based on that image: gcloud compute instances create --image this-particular-unikernel-version --machine-type=f1-micro this-particular-instance
  • watch it boot with gcloud compute instances tail-serial-port-output this-particular-instance
  • in the tech behemoth’s public cloud console, associate your public IPv4 address to this instance
  • notice formatting errors and typos and repeat as necessary

One-time AWS Shutdown

  • shut down and remove your AWS EC2 build host
  • delete your unikernel instances, snapshots, IPs, DNS records, and storage blocks from AWS
  • remove your billing information from AWS’s billing console

The Future

  • find a good reliable solar-powered place to host computers run by friendly people who don’t sell you out, nor your information
  • put a computer in there
  • install a good hypervisor and albatross
  • deploy unikernels all the live-long day
  • ???
  • fully automated luxury gay solarpunk communism