Rethinking Virtualization on 2014 and beyond !

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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. (..)

( The full article here ).

For more information about Docker and LXC Linux Containers here!

Francisco Gonçalves

( IT Architect & Open-Source Solutions Advisor )