1. Hypervise My App!
Justin Cormack @justincormack
http://sho.io/hypervise

2. Hypervisor
Platform as a service is about providing a
hypervisor for applications so they can be
securely isolated on shared systems.
As we shift from virtualising whole
operating systems to just running apps we
need smaller, lighter, faster and more
secure hypervisors.

3. “
“I once heard that Hypervisors are the living proof of Operating System's
incompetence. And if we think about it, OSes should be able to run services
alongside with each other peacefully. Isolation should be granted, and
excessive resource usage shouldn't be an issue. But because Linux was
never able to provide such isolation, people started to span more physical
servers to isolate services, and when that started to mean idle capacity,
hypervisors kicked in."
Glauber Costa, Parallels

4. Some history

5. “
Processes
“The only way quick response
can be provided at a
bearable cost is by timesharing. That is, the computer
must attend to other
customers while one customer
is reacting to some output.”
John McCarthy, 1 January 1959

6. Namespacing
• 1979 chroot
• 1980s Plan 9 from Bell Labs
• 2000 FreeBSD jail
• 2004 Solaris Zones
• 2001 Virtuozzo Containers, OpenVZ
• 2008 lxc
• 2011 Cloudfoundry Warden
• 2013 lmctfy, Docker

7. Access control
• 1975-1983 KeyKos
• 1983 Trusted Computer System
Evaluation Criteria
• 1990s JVM
• 1999 Linux capabilities
• 2001 SELinux
• 2005 Seccomp
• 2008 Google Native Client NaCl
• 2013 Capsicum

8. Library operating systems
• 1995 Exokernel
• 2012 OpenMirage
• 2009 NetBSD rump kernel
• 2012 Dune
• 2013 Drawbridge

9. Three new solutions

10. ZeroVM = processes + Google NaCl
Bought by Rackspace in 2013. Current main use case is for running
untrusted code in Hadoop-style apps.

11. OSv = hardware virtualization + single app JVM sandbox
Founded by ex-Qumranet ex-Redhat engineers, launched 2013

12. Docker = namespacing + ease of use

13. complexity
Complexity vs attack surface
Linux distro
Docker
OSv
ZeroVM
insecurity

14. “
x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full
of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct
page protection. Then running your operating system on the other side of
this brand new pile of shit.
You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide
collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or
applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly
write virtualization layers without security holes. Theo de Raadt

15. Trends
1. App developers are not experts here
2. Security historically led by Linux distros
3. Shifting to new structures and projects
4. So Redhat is getting involved in Docker fast
5. A move to simpler (eg CoreOS) is very disruptive
6. Distros large, slow, not on github
7. Lots of new code, changing fast

16. Questions?
Justin Cormack @justincormack
http://sho.io/hypervise