PROMETHIUM
Promethium is a set of services around the Firecracker Micro VM system developed by Amazon utilising the Linux KVM module.
Firecracker is used in production by Amazon and provides a reliable way for deploying containerised applications but utilising the additonal security of confined virutal machines.
Promethium aims to provide a convenient layer for managing Firecracker VMs whether in production or on a development environment and contains the following core components:
- Server & API endpoint for managing VMs in a secure fashion
- Integration with OSv and Capstan - in fact a wrapped and customised version of capstan is available as part of the command line tool. The bundled Capstan is extended and modified by Promethium to support Firecracker.
- A command line tool to manage Promethium instances
- A library for interacting with Promethium, Firecracker and Capstan - exposed via the API
Dependencies
Promethium's server API and the Firecracker system only run on linux and require KVM. The command line tools can be used on any host but must connect to a valid Promethium server. Packages contain everything you need but when cusomising and/or building Promethium it is necessary to bootstrap your environment. Please ensure your system has the following installed:
- A KVM enabled Linux distribution
- Docker
- Go 1.12 or above
Installation
From Packages
Visit the following link to install Promethium for your linux distribution
From Source
It is necessary to obtain the source first and build the support tools. There are some bootstrapping scripts included to help with this.