Workload Types

Table of Contents

Introduction

Each workload has a type which is associated with some data. We present here the different types of workload associated with Zero-OS.

Virtual Machine

network type

Private network can span multiple nodes at the same time. Which means workloads (VMs) that live (on different node) but part of the same virtual network can still reach each other over this private network.

If one (or more) nodes are public access nodes you can also add your personal laptop to the nodes and be able to reach your VMs over wireguard network.

In the simplest form a network workload consists of:

  • network range
  • sub-range available on this node
  • private key
  • list of peers
    • each peer has public key
    • sub-range

Full network definition can be found here

ip type

The IP workload type reserves an IP from the available contract IPs list. Which means on contract creation the user must specify number of public IPs it needs to use. The contract then will allocate this number of IPs from the farm and will kept on the contract.

When the user then add the IP workload to the deployment associated with this contract, each IP workload will pick and link to one IP from the contract.

In minimal form, IP workload does not require any data. But in reality it has 2 flags to pick which kind of public IP do you want

  • ipv4 (bool): pick one from the contract public Ipv4
  • ipv6 (bool): pick an IPv6 over SLAAC. Ipv6 are not reserved with a contract. They are basically free if the farm infrastructure allows Ipv6 over SLAAC.

Full IP workload definition can be found here

zmount type

A zmount is a local disk that can be attached directly to a container or a virtual machine. zmount only require size as input as defined here this workload type is only utilized via the zmachine workload.

zmachine type

zmachine is a unified container/virtual machine type. This can be used to start a virtual machine on a zos node give the following:

  • flist, this what provide the base vm image or container image.
    • the flist content is what changes the zmachine mode. An flist built from a docker image or has files, or executable binaries will run in a container mode. ZOS will inject it's own kernel+initramfs to run the workload and kick start the defined flist entrypoint
  • private network to join (with assigned IP)
  • optional public ipv4 or ipv6
  • optional disks. But at least one disk is required in case running zmachine in vm mode, which is used to hold the vm root image.

For more details on all parameters needed to run a zmachine please refer to zmachine data

Building your flist

Please refer to this document here about how to build an compatible zmachine flist

zlogs type

Zlogs is a utility workload that allows you to stream zmachine logs to a remote location.

The zlogs workload needs to know what zmachine to stream logs of and also the target location to stream the logs to. zlogs uses internally the tailstream so it supports any streaming url that is supported by this utility.

zlogs workload runs inside the same private network as the zmachine instance. Which means zlogs can stream logs to other zmachines that is running inside the same private network (possibly on different nodes).

For example, you can run logagg which is a web-socket server that can work with tailstream web-socket protocol.

Check zlogs configuration here

Storage

zdb type

zdb is a storage primitives that gives you a persisted key value store over RESP protocol. Please check zdb docs

Please check here for workload data.

qsfs type

qsfs short for quantum safe file system is a FUSE filesystem which aim to be able to support unlimited local storage with remote backend for offload and backup which cannot be broke even by a quantum computer. Please read about it here

To create a qsfs workload you need to provide the workload type as here

Gateway

gateway-name-proxy type

This create a proxy with the given name to the given backends. The name of the proxy must be owned by a name contract on the grid. The idea is that a user can reserve a name (i.e example). Later he can deploy a gateway work load with name example on any gateway node that points to specified backends. The name then is prefix by the gateway name. For example if the gateway domain is gent0.freefarm.com then your full QFDN is goint to be called example.gen0.freefarm.com

Full name-proxy workload data is defined here

gateway-fqdn-proxy type

This create a proxy with the given fqdn to the given backends. In this case the user then must configure his dns server (i.e name.com) to point to the correct node public IP.

Full name-proxy workload data is defined here

Last change: 2024-02-27