Cloud Native VM – Total Portability

Today I am going to tell you about an upcoming technology we are working on for the enterprise arsenal.

It’s called Cloud Native VM (cnvm).  

Watch this:

What just happened?

You just saw a Cloud Native VM (cnvm) moving “live” around the world from a VMware private cloud in St. Louis Missouri, USA to Google’s cloud in Belgium.

In the video you see the cnvm deploy to VMware in the States, we log into it and install some software, and then live-migrate to Europe.

Really?

Yes.  We've created a Cloud Native VM leveraging Docker and Weave, and we moved it across the planet without turning it off, without losing connectivity.

Cloud Native VMs Primary Features Are:

• Cloud-Agnostic
• Portable
• Open

Cloud Agnostic:

Cloud Native VMs can be deployed on any hypervisor or bare metal provider.  VMware, Microsoft HyperV, Xen, KVM.  You choose one, some, or all, cnvms are not restricted to any vendor’s hypervisor or bare metal offering.

Cloud Native VMs can be deployed into any cloud provider.  Choose between cloud providers like: Amazon, Google, Microsoft Azure, VCloud Air, cnvms are not restricted to any cloud provider or by a cloud provider’s proprietary features.

Portable:

Cloud Native VMs are mobile.  Migrate cnvms between private and public clouds.  For example, cnvms running on VMware in your East Coast datacenter, can be migrated to your VMware cluster running in your West Coast datacenter or they be moved from your datacenter to an Amazon AWS cloud presence.

Today, vendors offer offer VM migrations to like-for-like hypervisors as a licensed feature, but cnvms provide the same capability without the like-for-like restrictions.  Public to private, Public to Public, HyperV to Xen to VMware, and every combination in between.  You have the choice.

Take snapshots of your running cnvms and restore them when/where you like, and they maintain a consistent network identity.

Open:

Cloud Native VMs are built on, of and from open-source.  Intentionally open to avoid affinity for a particular infrastructure or cloud vendor ecosystem.  Being shared open source allows them to be customized for use cases that are yet to be realized.

Cloud Native VMs are currently built from and utilizing features and functionality from open source projects including:

Linux

Runc

CRIU

Weave

Phusion

Docker

The Best Of Both Worlds

A Cloud Native VM is a VM, inside a container.

The enterprise has applications and workload needs that are vertically scaled and/or not destined for a micro-services future.  Now those applications and workloads have a VM context to run in, that gives them the flexibility they needs as they chart the future of their datacenter, wherever and however that might be.

Cloud Native VM also provides the enterprise with a familiar compute and operational experience, coupled with the amazingly efficient and portable nature of containers.  

The enterprise can begin to bridge the skills gap to a horizontally scaled, cloud native application architecture with Cloud Native VM, and have a place to move their legacy applications and give them the freedom to migrate.

A Call To Action:

Consider the enterprise use-cases.  How could you things change if movement/providers/locations were no longer barriers?

We want to hear from you!  

If you'd like to share some thoughts on use-cases or if you want more information about our upcoming enterprise offerings based on this capability - please send email to info@enteon.com.

Open Source

The instructions and source are available in the repo below for you to set up your own multi-node testbed and experience cnvm yourself.

Get involved, let us know what you think - this capability is early in its development and we want and need all of your help to make it better and give the enterprise the capabilities they need; leveraging the cutting edge of current technology!  We need your PRs!

github:

https://github.com/gonkulator/cnvm

Jim McBride

jim@enteon.com / @stlalpha