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AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

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Re: AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

#41

Post by dboreham »

gerdesj wrote: post #10

Could someone explain why this is might be a big deal? I remember playing with nested virty some years ago and deciding it is a backwards step except for PoC and the like. Given I haven't personally run out of virty gear, I never needed to do a PoC.

If you have some workload that creates VMs, now you can run that workload on EC2 rather than having to use bare metal or some other provider that allows nested virtualization. There are many many such workloads. Just to give one example: testing a build system that spins up VMs to host CI jobs.

Re: AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

#43

Post by sien »

QuinnyPig wrote: post #27
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…

I always enjoy the color you add to these conversations. Thanks!

I always enjoy the color you add to these conversations in your newsletter.

It's provided many a chuckle.

Thanks!

Re: AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

#45

Post by otterley »

wmf wrote: post #33
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously curious, don’t Firecracker VMs already run on EC2 instances under the hood when they host Lambda and Fargate?

Since I don't work for AWS I'm allowed to say that at the scale of millions/billions of microVMs you're better off running them on bare metal instances to avoid the overhead of nested virtualization.

I used to work for AWS and I’m allowed to say the same thing. ;-)

Re: AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

#46

Post by rescbr »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #35
otterley wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I'm not at liberty to dive deep into those details. I will say that Firecracker can be used on bare metal EC2 instances, whether you're a public customer or AWS itself. :-)

I guess I should have peeked at the source code when I was there…

No need, at least when I was there when the day was still one, before the pandemic. And well, Firecracker is open source.

A few of the best technical presentations that I've watched were at a pre-SKO event. Nitro, Graviton and Firecracker.

Great engineering pieces, the three of them.

Re: AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

#48

Post by wmf »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #34

I wonder if this is connected to Azure launching OpenShift Virtualization on "Boost" SKUs? There are a lot of VMWare customers going to OpenShift Virt, and apparently the CPU/memory overhead on Azure maxes out around 10% under full load... but then hyper V has been doing a lot of work on it. No idea if nitro includes any of the KVM-on-KVM passthrough of full KVM, to give it an edge here.

Azure? OpenShift? "I don't think about you at all." — Matt Garman probably

Re: AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

#50

Post by firesteelrain »

anurag wrote: post #11

This is a big deal because you can now run Firecracker/other microVMs in an AWS VM instead of expensive AWS bare-metal instances. GCP has had nested virtualization for a while.

Azure has had nested virt available for a while too. I used to run HyperV in cloud
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