Spawning & cloning

Instant boxes from golden images, with snapshot and clone.

Spawn on connect

When you connect to a box that doesn't exist, krillbox clones it from a golden image's ZFS snapshot — a copy-on-write clone, so it's instant and uses almost no disk until the box writes. The kernel + minimal init bring sshd up in about half a second, then the gateway proxies you in.

ssh box@krillbox.gra.ke2.cloud.ovh.net                       # create-if-absent, then connect
ssh cli@krillbox.gra.ke2.cloud.ovh.net box up mybox          # explicit create

Snapshots

Snapshot a box's disk at any time (instant, ZFS):

ssh cli@krillbox.gra.ke2.cloud.ovh.net box snapshot mybox [name]
ssh cli@krillbox.gra.ke2.cloud.ovh.net box snapshot list
ssh cli@krillbox.gra.ke2.cloud.ovh.net box snapshot rm mybox@<snap>

Cloning

Create a new box from another box's snapshot — again CoW, so forks are cheap. If the source lives on another host, its snapshot is shipped over the cluster network on demand, then the clone boots there.

ssh cli@krillbox.gra.ke2.cloud.ovh.net box up fork --from mybox

Lifecycle

ssh cli@krillbox.gra.ke2.cloud.ovh.net box suspend mybox
ssh cli@krillbox.gra.ke2.cloud.ovh.net box resume mybox