Cloudius's OSv Operating System Boots in Under 1 Second
An emerging operating system that has DevOps and IaaS providers excited is the new Cloudius OSv operating system. Cloudius OSv is its own operating system built on its own kernel. Unlike Docker, which runs on top of Linux, Cloudius OSv works much like the popular containerization app however OSv is its own unique OS in itself. It’s important to note that Cloudius isn’t a flavor of Linux like other cloud operating systems. Cloudius OSv developers created the kernel with one thing in mind: Speed. Wernel Vogels, the Chief Technology Officer at Amazon, recently mentioned that Cloudius is a company to watch as their OSv product leaves the alpha testing stage and enters the beta testing stage.
Jason Verge, who is considered an authority on data center software and administration, recently wrote that Cloudius “Set out to build the fastest guest OS possible designed specifically for cloud. OSv is designed to run on top of hypervisors only and serve web-scale workloads like NoSQL, micro services, and common runtimes.” Verge goes on to note that OSv only takes up 20MBs of space and that the OS dramatically reduces TCP packet latency.
Cloudius’s development team has ties to the Red Hat community. The founders of Cloudius have experience working with RedHat on the KVM hypervisor. Cloudius CEO Dor Laor is quoted as saying, “After spending a lot of time at Red Hat and contributing to Linux, we saw what’s going on with the cloud. Usually the deployment is one application per server, and it’s a waste to have a huge general purpose OS running on another OS. OSV is unique because it runs a single application atop a hypervisor and it’s much easier to use. We load the application transparently, and there’s a lot of performance optimization. In terms of internal manageability, we have a kernel runtime and application. That’s it.”
Laor also notes that OSv can run on top of any hypervisor. Laor continued to explain OSv and how he sees it fitting into the cloud server ecosystem. Laor mentioned, “With the rise of cloud, the amount of servers constantly rises. There’s a must to automate them. The larger the scale and cluster sizes grow, the opportunity increases. The more automation is needed. The root filesystem is stateless, we do not keep any configuration file in it. Everything is done in REST API. This allows DevOps to manage the entire thing from Amazon cloud services. You don’t even need automation tools like Chef or Puppet.”
CloudWedge will continue to post updates about Cloudius and OSv as news becomes available on this project.
