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AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

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Re: AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

#101

Post by LunaSea »

alexellisuk wrote: post #83
PunchyHamster wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bare-metal on Hetzner now has a setup fee of up to 350 EUR.. you can find some stuff with 0 setup fee, but it's usually quite old kit. I don't understand what you are paying for here, nested virtualization doesn't need any extra setup for hardware compared to normal one ... or you are saying Hetzner wants 350 EUR for turning on normal virtualization option in BIOS ?

They used to charge a fair admin fee like 30-70 EUR for most bare-metal hosts.. now it's 99 EUR for the most basic/cheapest option.. up to 350 EUR for something modest like a 16 Core Ryzen.. monthly fees haven't changed much. https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ex/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/

You'll still pay 10x less than any of the cloud platforms.

Re: AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

#102

Post by ushakov »

HumanOstrich wrote: post #57
iJohnDoe wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was hoping this comment would be here. Firecracker and microVMs are good use-case. Also, being able to simply test and develop is a nice to have. Nested virtualization can mean a lot of things. Not just full VMs.

> Firecracker and microVMs are good use-case. Good use-case for what?

We are running Sandboxes for AI Agents using Firecracker microVMS @ E2B

Re: AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

#103

Post by blibble »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #70
otterley wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an Amazon EC2 Specialist SA in a prior role, so I know a little about this. If EC2 were like your home server, you might be right. And an EC2 bare metal instance is the closest approximation to that. On bare metal, you've always been free to run your own VMs, and we had some customers who rolled their own nested VM implementations on it. But EC2 is not like your home server. There are some nontrivial considerat…

All that sounds like it would better be a contribution to KVM from the get go rather than invent stuff that eventually showed up in KVM anyway

it's been in kvm since the mid 10s

and in Xen (which they used to run) for at least as long

Re: AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

#104

Post by briffle »

otterley wrote: post #96
HumanOstrich wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been around for almost 15 years and stable enough for several providers to roll it out in production the past 10 years (GCP and Azure in 2017). AWS is just late to the game because they've rolled so much of their own stack instead of adapting open source solutions and contributing back to them.

> AWS is just late to the game because they've rolled so much of their own stack instead of adapting open source solutions and contributing back to them. This is emphatically not true. Contributing to KVM and the kernel (which AWS does anyway) would not have accelerated the availability. EC2 is not just a data center with commodity equipment. They have customer demands for security and performance that far exceed wha…

As do all the other cloud providers, that have had this for years. like GCP and Azure, for 9 years now.

Re: AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

#105

Post by otterley »

briffle wrote: post #104
otterley wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AWS is just late to the game because they've rolled so much of their own stack instead of adapting open source solutions and contributing back to them. This is emphatically not true. Contributing to KVM and the kernel (which AWS does anyway) would not have accelerated the availability. EC2 is not just a data center with commodity equipment. They have customer demands for security and performance that far exceed wha…

As do all the other cloud providers, that have had this for years. like GCP and Azure, for 9 years now.

Architecturally they’re all quite different.

If my sources are correct, GCP did not launch on dedicated hardware like EC2 did, which raised customer concerns about isolation guarantees. (Not sure if that’s still the case.) And Azure didn’t have hardware-assisted I/O virtualization ("Azure Boost") until just a few years ago and it's not as mature as Nitro.

Even today, Azure doesn’t support nested virtualization the way one might ordinarily expect them to. It's only supported with Hyper-V on the guest, i.e., Windows.

Re: AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

#106

Post by laurencerowe »

otterley wrote: post #105
briffle wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As do all the other cloud providers, that have had this for years. like GCP and Azure, for 9 years now.

Architecturally they’re all quite different. If my sources are correct, GCP did not launch on dedicated hardware like EC2 did, which raised customer concerns about isolation guarantees. (Not sure if that’s still the case.) And Azure didn’t have hardware-assisted I/O virtualization ("Azure Boost") until just a few years ago and it's not as mature as Nitro. Even today, Azure doesn’t support nested virtualization the wa…

Nested virtualisation with KVM works on the Linux GitHub Actions runners which I believe run on Azure.

Re: AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

#107

Post by otterley »

laurencerowe wrote: post #106
otterley wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Architecturally they’re all quite different. If my sources are correct, GCP did not launch on dedicated hardware like EC2 did, which raised customer concerns about isolation guarantees. (Not sure if that’s still the case.) And Azure didn’t have hardware-assisted I/O virtualization ("Azure Boost") until just a few years ago and it's not as mature as Nitro. Even today, Azure doesn’t support nested virtualization the wa…

Nested virtualisation with KVM works on the Linux GitHub Actions runners which I believe run on Azure.

GitHub says:

> While nested virtualization is technically possible while using runners, it is not officially supported. Any use of nested VMs is experimental and done at your own risk, we offer no guarantees regarding stability, performance, or compatibility.

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/concepts/runners/github-h...

Re: AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

#109

Post by indigodaddy »

alexellisuk wrote: post #64

This is great news for folks that use microVMs - "we only use AWS" has been an issue for our stuff (slicer services/sandboxes/actuated self-hosted GitHub runners) If anyone here can't wait (as it looks like there's very little info on this at the moment..) I wrote up detailed instructions for Ant Group's KVM-PVM patches. Performance is OK for background servers/tasks, but does take a hit up to 50% on complex builds l…

Why would we need PVM if AWS now supports nested virt?

Re: AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

#110

Post by sidewndr46 »

lelandbatey wrote: post #100
sidewndr46 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used Hetzner because their terms of service didn't make any sense to me, but a 350 EUR fee for each setup? That almost seems like they don't want business. Every bare metal host I've used had a management interface I could submit a job to in order to reprovision my host at any time. Some even offer a recovery console through this. It takes 1-10 minutes but I'm assuming it was out of band management based,…

Hetzner offers uniquely cheap dedicated hosting, even beating OVH. Per their statement about the fees, they're having to do this because without the setup fees, recent hardware prices increases would otherwise raise the price of acquiring new hardware so high that they would essentially never make a profit on the hardware they would have to buy for new orders. They're also saying that their overall prices are going t…

That seems counter to a "pay as you go" or "pay what you use for" model. I'd rather have sky high monthly fees, so that I don't have a sunk cost.
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