KVM? Us? Amazon erases new hypervisor from AWS EC2 FAQ

Amazon Web Services has quietly edited its FAQ in which it revealed it has created a new KVM-based hypervisor and will use it instead of Xen for future instances. The webpage now contains no mention of the hypervisor. But Google's cached record of the page does. And in case AWS manages to get that scrubbed, we grabbed this …

[Trevor_Pott]

KVM: Now powering two of the big three public clouds. What's that VMware? KVM is "not ready for the enterprise"? I think you know better.

[Adam 52]

AWS hasn't switched any significant amount of workload yet (as far as we know). Google might use a heavily modified KVM but they don't use Qemu so there's very little point in comparison with VMware.

Agreed that VMware doesn't look good a mega scale, but for a smaller outfit (i.e. anyone with < $10bn revenue) where you don't have a dedicated engineering team to continually tweak the hypervisor and build your own management tools then it's still a viable option if you really don't want to do "cloud".

[Mad Mike]

I suspect this has nothing to do with technology, but is simply financial. If these giant clouds used VMWare, they would have to pay licensing etc,. which would cost a pretty penny. With KVM and Xen etc., there is no licensing to pay. Being able to modify it to your needs is potentially also a benefit.

[Anonymous Coward]

"KVM is "not ready for the enterprise"? I think you know better."

Well it is a bolt onto an OS and not a fully separated Hypervisor like Hyper-V Server and vSphere are and comes with that inherent security and performance overhead. Hyper-V at least significantly outperforms KVM in benchmarks with OpenStack, etc. and is also "free".

[Troy Tempest]

You're kidding me, right? Hyper-V better than what?

- pretending to be "free"? Certainly not performance.

[Anonymous Coward]

"- pretending to be "free"? Certainly not performance."

Hyper-V Server is and has always been totally free with all features enabled. If you run it under OpenStack it's free to manage too - and there are at least couple of publically available benchmarks that show that it significantly outperforms KVM in that scenario!

[Alistair]

@ Trevor

I keep telling folks this - and we've a few small islands that use it intensely in DEV environments, but getting *anyone* other than the hands on guys to buy that is equivalent to pulling teeth out of a hungry T-rex. Most of the issue we're presented with at this stage is that handing C&C off to the <outsourced> staff without the pretty utterly dumbed down front end is just about impossible.

[Nate Amsden]

amazon has how many developers and support staff to hack KVM and Xen to be something viable for them?

KVM or Xen are more of technologies rather than a product (the product would be Redhat KVM hypervisor whatever they call it these days, or Citrix Xen hypervisor etc..)

KVM looks interesting (Xen never has to me), though I haven't seen anything that makes me interested in trying it over ESXi (currently running 5.5).

But I'm sure it can work fine for many folks otherwise.

[BinkyTheMagicPaperclip]

Emulated IDE drive?

That's a bit odd, as Xen has a number of higher performing options including AHCI, and xvda paravirtualised access to underlying block devices.

[jms222]

It's simply about how many they can pile onto a given piece of hardware. Preferably without telling people it's changed.