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Comment by tkiolp4 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t need slimmer containers, I need slimmer VMs.

Honest question: I’m using Vagrant and virtualbox to locally reproduce my cloud infrastructure. I can’t do this just with containers (Some of my servers do not run containers, so I install packages via Ansible and apt, I use systemd, etc.). How do you reproduce locally infrastructure with just containers?

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Containers for sure aren't a replacement for VMs. And indeed, VMs still have and will have legitimate use cases. There is actually a relatively simple way to turn a container into a VM. Maybe you'll find it useful https://iximiuz.com/en/posts/from-docker-container-to-bootab...

For testing purposes, you can create container environments that are similar to VMs.

The way I do it, is to use ansible playbooks, where the individual tasks can be run either on a VM or in a container, depending on my needs (one example https://github.com/raesene/container_sec_workstation)

You can't reproduce your entire configuration with containers, since kernel version might be different. But everything else is fair game given proper namespacing, and AFAICT modern Linux aims for namespacing of all possible resources.

We've been working on a new hypervisor https://kwarantine.xyz that can run strongly isolated containers. It’s still a WIP though.

Provision them with cloud-init in both places

Have you looked into Firecracker?

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