I recently stumbled across IncludeOS, a cool project that allows developers to embed a tiny operating system into their applications, allowing them to be run without any interaction with a classic operating system like Linux or Windows.

This is exciting as it allows the application to be run with the absolute bare minimum dependencies, ensuring a lightweight distributable image. According to the creators, applications can be booted in tens of milliseconds, and have a low memory footprint. This puts this project in the same arena as AWS Lambda and other Function as a Service (FaaS) providers.

It takes a little bit of setting up, but I found my experience was made a fair bit easier with Multipass from Ubuntu. Using this tool, I created a light Ubuntu VM on my Mac and set up all of the dependencies within it.

apt-get install python3-pip python3-dev git cmake clang-6.0 gcc nasm make qemu
pip3 install setuptools wheel conan psutil jsonschema
conan config install https://github.com/includeos/conan_config.git

I could then build the hello world example, and boot it using QEMU. Remember, this is an entire operating system spinning up here, not just a container (!!):

git clone https://github.com/includeos/hello_world.git
mkdir build && cd "$_"
conan install ../hello_world -pr clang-6.0-linux-x86_64
source activate.sh
cmake ..
cmake --build .
boot hello

When I booted the application, the console was filled with a whole heap of stuff, but importantly:

[...]
 IncludeOS 0.15.1-5 (x86_64 / 64-bit)
 +--> Running [ Hello world - OS included ]
[...]

How cool is that? I downloaded and installed the dependencies, and within five minutes I had my own operating system running locally. The team at IncludeOS have also written a really neat tutorial on how to get the net-enabled examples running on Google Compute Engine. Check it out here.

When I was playing, I tried to use my newly compiled (and GRUB-loaded) images on DigitalOcean through their Custom Image functionality. Even though I managed to get the image converted to a VMDK (VirtualBox disk image), and could get a Droplet to launch, I could not get the IP to respond with the application. More digging required I think!

I will be following the development of this project closely. It would be super cool to try and write a toy FaaS platform based around this technology! :)