HACKER Q&A
📣 wilsonny

The Trend of Lightweight Virtualization?


Lightweight virtualization has been developing over recent years. There are a lot of new runtimes and VMMs have been introduced such as kata containers, ignite, firecracker, and cloud hypervisor.

However, it seems like these lightweight virtualizations are just pretty much the same as managing Qemu/KVM VMs using docker and/or Kubernetes. Does anyone have some insight of the possible future of this area? What could be the final outcome of this area with the convergence of these techniques?

Thanks

Wilson

  👤 eyberg Accepted Answer ✓
We (NanoVMs) are looking at unikernels - that is reworking the guest. Also, while they reside on top of a hypervisor there is plenty of work that can be done to advance the state of the art here. NFV, 5G, and edge deployments are going to drive a lot of attention here.

I wouldn't discount the work of firecracker here because that is more on the line of reworking the monitor versus the guest which really hasn't had a ton of attention in the past. Other work here includes things like Solo5.