this project looks phenomenal. The article assumed I was already familiar with MirageOS and why I would want such a set-up ... but thankfully the MirageOS homepage covered my questions:
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Self-scaling architecture
We can create auto-scaling web-servers with very small footprints. These would be cheaper to run than current solutions due to the small size but they would also be highly elastic. If a sudden spike in traffic occurs, the web-servers can be configured to create and deploy copies of themselves to service the demand. This auto-scaling happens so quickly that an incoming connection can trigger the creation of new server and the new server can then handle that request before it times out (which is on the order of milliseconds). When the demand dies down again, these web-servers can automatically shut themselves down. Since these machines boot fast we can be more elastic, raising and lowering capacity to precisely meet demand and therefore only spending what we actually need when we really need it.
...
Xen is a very large beast so maybe replacing it with Genode could further reduce attack surface and even speed? Even though I'm unfamiliar with OCaml and Mirage this has whetted my appetite to learn more about it.
...
Self-scaling architecture
We can create auto-scaling web-servers with very small footprints. These would be cheaper to run than current solutions due to the small size but they would also be highly elastic. If a sudden spike in traffic occurs, the web-servers can be configured to create and deploy copies of themselves to service the demand. This auto-scaling happens so quickly that an incoming connection can trigger the creation of new server and the new server can then handle that request before it times out (which is on the order of milliseconds). When the demand dies down again, these web-servers can automatically shut themselves down. Since these machines boot fast we can be more elastic, raising and lowering capacity to precisely meet demand and therefore only spending what we actually need when we really need it.
...
Xen is a very large beast so maybe replacing it with Genode could further reduce attack surface and even speed? Even though I'm unfamiliar with OCaml and Mirage this has whetted my appetite to learn more about it.