Small Scale

Advanced Tooling with Ignite

I extended the tooling created for Footloose described in the first article to create, show, configure, and clean up microVM stacks. To get started with the wrapper [8], just download the sources with

git clone https://github.com/richnusgeeks/devops.git
pushd CloudInABox/MicroVMs/scripts

You could use cd instead of pushd, but I prefer pushd for its intelligence. The wrapper script execution should show you a help screen (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Wrapper utility help screen for microVMs.

The top level wrapper script just takes a simple configuration (Listing 3). Simply execute

# Name     Count Image                          Kernel                           Cpu Memory Disk Ports([hostPort:]containerPort)
ubuntu1804 1     weaveworks/ignite-ubuntu:18.04 weaveworks/ignite-kernel:5.13.3  2   2G     20G  22,38080,52812,58080
centos8    1     weaveworks/ignite-centos:8     weaveworks/ignite-kernel:5.13.3  2   2G     20G  22,38080,52812,58080
kafka      3     weaveworks/ignite-ubuntu:20.04 weaveworks/ignite-kernel:5.12.18 2   2G     20G  22,2181,8080,9092,38080,52812,58080
spark      3     weaveworks/ignite-ubuntu:20.04 weaveworks/ignite-kernel:5.12.18 2   2G     20G  22,7077,8080,8081,38080,52812,58080
consul     3     weaveworks/ignite-ubuntu:20.04 weaveworks/ignite-kernel:5.13.3  1   2G     20G  22,52812,58080,58500
hashiui    1     weaveworks/ignite-ubuntu:20.04 weaveworks/ignite-kernel:5.13.3  1   2G     20G  22,52812,53000,58080

sudo ./create_micro_vms_stack.sh create

to bring up the defined microVM stack. The creation of a stack also triggers an Ansible ping to the spawned microVMs to ensure SSH connectivity. Figures 5 and 6 show some portions of the creation output of 16 microVM stacks on my laptop. The commands

sudo ./create_micro_vms_stack.sh test <ansible role name, e.g., spark>
sudo /create_micro_vms_stack.sh delete

Figure 5: Starting microVMs stack.

Figure 6: Info about created microVMs stack.

configure the created microVMs with the necessary software and clean up the enacted stack (Figure 7).

Figure 7: topping microVMs stack.

Conclusion

AWS Firecracker is a breakthrough technology that provides the best from both the container and virtual machine worlds. Ignite further creates a user-friendly declarative GitOps mechanism that provides additional functionality over Firecracker to run OCI containers under strong isolation of hardware-assisted virtualization. The resulting microVMs are highly useful in all use cases, ranging from development to production environments. Adoption of these microVM-based instant stacks will boost engineering effectiveness while slashing your infrastructure bill.