Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Cloud run has abandoned gvisor in their "second generation" execution environment for containers

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/serverless/cloud-run-...

Obviously there might be many reasons for that, but as someone who worked on a similar gvisor tech for another company, it's dead in the water. No security expert or consultant will ever sign off on a process isolation model. Despite of architecture, audits, reviews, etc. There is just too much surface area for anyone to feel comfortable signing off on hostile multi-tenants with process isolation regardless of the sandboxing tech.

Not saying that there are no bugs in hypervisors, but the surface area is so so much smaller.




The first sentence pretty much sums it up: "Cloud Run’s new execution environment provides increased CPU and network performance and lets you mount network file systems." It's not a secret that performance is slower under gvisor and there are compatibility issues: https://gvisor.dev/docs/architecture_guide/performance/

Disclaimer: I work on this product but wasn't involved in this decision.


gvisor isn't simply a process isolation model. Security experts will certainly sign off on gvisor for some multitenant workloads. The reason Google is moving from it, to the extent they are, is that hypervisors are more performant for more common workloads.


I read "we got tired of reimplementing Linux kernel syscalls and functionality" as the reason. Like network file systems. The Cloud Run client base kept asking for more and more features, and they punted to just running the Linux kernel.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: