
Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2014. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Raj Dutt, senior vice president of technology at Internap
2014: Rethinking the Hypervisor
As developers architect a new generation of scale-out applications
designed to run and directly interact with the cloud, we're starting to see
more industry discussion around hardware speeds and feeds, and another "old-is-new"
resurgence around containerization - which raises questions about the future of
the hypervisor.
Just a few months ago, Amazon released their C3
instances, and for the first time, they explicitly promise dedicated hyper-threads
on specific Intel silicon. I see that as a good thing, regardless of how "un-cloud-like"
it may be to talk about particular models of hardware. It's the closest Amazon
has come to a dedicated server, but it's still virtualized.
For large, Internet-centric, scale-out users, performance
consistency is critical. These users want to know and optimize for exactly what
they're getting under the hood, down to the specific processor. This is why
colocation, dedicated servers, and bare-metal cloud continue to be popular with
this crowd: they can offer an unbeatable combination of price, performance, and
consistency, all with zero virtualization tax.
Virtualization has become entrenched in the cloud
vernacular. No doubt it has been a big enabler and has helped advance the
state-of-the-art, but how strong a role will it play in tomorrow's clouds? I'd
argue that the traditional enterprise virtualization value proposition is
really irrelevant to these users.
They don't care about software and OS heterogeneity - they're
all running a commodity Linux build and treating their infrastructure as code
with configuration management. They don't care about server consolidation -
they're scale out, not scale up, and everything is redlining. They're fully
aware of Moore's law, just underserved and worried by it!
The opportunities for bare-metal cloud become even more interesting
with the resurgence we're seeing around containerization (similar to jails,
chroots, or zones, depending on your background). Docker is one of the most
promising examples (open source, of course) on the horizon, allowing developers
to create lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers for applications
and run them at scale. Instead of an entire virtual machine, it provides a
virtual Linux environment. No virtualization tax and a boot time measured in a
few seconds instead of a few minutes.
Docker seems like a great fit for bare-metal cloud, and
offers a potentially more compelling way to deliver the entire performance of a
bare metal server for a single tenant than virtualization. It also addresses
things that are really important to web developers, which the hypervisor missed
the mark on, including better support for rapid development, scalability,
cross-cloud portability, roll-back, and version-control.
Is
the hypervisor under siege? Not necessarily, but I think these trends are going
to cause a rethinking of how we run and package applications in the cloud. It's
not a zero sum game though. I suspect the more successful clouds will meld
these things together and provide new and compelling ways for customers to run
their applications.
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