AWS Virtualization with Anthony Liguori

Amazon’s virtual server instances have come a long way since the early days of EC2. There are now a wide variety of available configuration options for spinning up an EC2 instance, which can be chosen from based on the workload that will be scheduled onto a virtual machine. There are also Fargate containers and AWS Lambda functions, creating even more options for someone who wants to deploy virtualized infrastructure. The high demand for virtual machines has led to Amazon moving down the stack, designing custom hardware such as the Nitro security chip, and low level software such as the Firecracker virtual machine monitor. AWS also has built Outposts, which allow for on-prem usage of AWS infrastructure. Anthony Liguori is an engineer at AWS who has worked on a range of virtualization infrastructure: software platforms, hypervisors, and hardware. Anthony joins the show to talk about virtualization at all levels of the stack.