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I think one thing that articles like this miss is that not all cloud services run, themselves, in VMs. For example, most of Google's don't. While virtualization
by loosescrews 5y ago
I think one thing that articles like this miss is that not all cloud services run, themselves, in VMs. For example, most of Google's don't. While virtualization has improved a lot, it wouldn't be possible to replicate many of Google's cloud offerings with competitive performance and cost on Google's Compute Engine. Cloud Storage, BigQuery, serverless (Cloud Run, App Engine, Cloud Functions), Spanner, Bigtable, and Firestore all come to mind.
One big challenge for cloud workloads is multi-tenancy. If you want to run arbitrary untrusted code on the cloud, your only option is something like gVisor (which isn't exactly a compromise-free solution). Nested virtualization is not secure and will likely even preform worse.
- markgavalda 5y agoI agree, however I really like what https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/ https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/ is doing to change the above.
- loosescrews 5y agoCan you elaborate on how Firecracker is changing the situation? My claim is that it isn't possible to build services on top of GCE/EC2 that compete with 1st party cloud offerings in important ways. The problems with nested virtualization are mostly in silicon and to some extent in kvm. Firecracker doesn't really have much to do with it as the VMM isn't the problem. You could use Firecracker to build your own GCE/EC2 competitor on bare metal, but that solves a different problem.
- cthalupa 5y agoYou can get bare metal instances without a hypervisor on EC2