Ever wondered how cloud optimises resources, ensures security, and scales seamlessly? This is the power of visualisation a.k.a Hypervisors, the solid backend of cloud computing. Every cloud you see today is built on virtualisation hardware.
They enable the efficient utilisation of hardware resources, facilitate the creation and management of virtual machines (VMs), and provide the backbone for many automation processes in IT environments.
Virtualisation technology makes cloud computing possible. Cloud providers set up and maintain their own datacenters. They create different virtual environments that use the underlying hardware resources. You can then program your system to access these cloud resources by using APIs. Your infrastructure needs can be met as a fully managed service.
That's why someone wisely said:
"There is no cloud, its just someone else's computer"
Types of Hypervisors:
Hypervisors come in two primary types: Type 1 (bare-metal) and Type 2 (hosted).
Type 1 Hypervisors or Bare-Metal Hypervisors:
These hypervisors run directly on the physical hardware of the host machine without requiring a host operating system. They provide high efficiency and performance, making them ideal for enterprise environments. Examples include VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Xen.
Advantages:
Direct hardware access allows for better performance and resource management. Enhanced security is achieved by minimising the attack surface.
All public or private clouds we see today are built on type 1 hypervisors. AWS started off on opensource Xen hypervisor and later around 2017, started moving towards linux based KVM, another opensource hypervisor.
The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Cloud Hypervisor is also based on the open-source KVM hypervisor.
Azure Hypervisor is referred to the native hypervisor in Azure Cloud Services platform that enables in creating virtualised machines and servers on Azure Cloud Platform. It is similar to Microsoft Hyper V, but it is customised specifically for Azure Platform.
Type 2 Hypervisors or Hosted Hypervisors:
These run on top of a conventional operating system and are used primarily for testing and development purposes on personal devices. Examples include VMware Workstation, Oracle VM VirtualBox, and Parallels Desktop.
Advantages: Easier to set up and use, as they operate within a familiar OS environment. Suitable for smaller-scale operations and individual use cases.
Hypervisors Benefits:
Hypervisors are the foundation to the infrastructure of cloud computing, providing the mechanism for virtualisation, which is essential for cloud service delivery models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS). Without hypervisor virtualisation there would have been no cloud as we see today.
Resource Optimisation:
Hypervisors enable the pooling of physical resources, allowing multiple VMs to share the same hardware. This leads to better resource utilisation and cost savings for cloud service providers.
Scalability and Flexibility:
Cloud environments require the ability to scale resources up or down based on demand. Hypervisors facilitate this by enabling the quick deployment and management of VMs, ensuring that resources can be adjusted dynamically.
Isolation and Security:
Hypervisors provide isolation between different VMs, ensuring that applications and data in one VM do not interfere with those in another. This isolation is crucial for maintaining security in multi-tenant cloud environments.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity:
The ability to quickly spin up VMs in different locations helps in disaster recovery scenarios. Hypervisors support snapshots and live migration, which are essential for maintaining business continuity.
Automation and Hypervisors:
Automation is crucial in modern IT environments, and hypervisors play a key role in enabling and enhancing automation processes.
Automated Provisioning:
Hypervisors support automated provisioning of VMs, allowing for the rapid deployment of environments as needed. This is essential for continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines in DevOps practices.
However, Infrastructure-As-Code is still out of scope for any bare metal installation. Unlike virtual machines os setup, installing the hypervisor os such as VMware's ESXI must be done manually on the bare metal servers. Although you can automate this using bootstrap scripts but thats is more a configuration management than Infrastructure as code. Even for type 2 it is mostly manual from the UI of the host operating system.
Once the hypervisor is setup, you can use infrastructure-as-code tools like terraform to provision vms and configure it accordingly.
Resource Management:
Automation tools can monitor and manage resources dynamically, reallocating them based on workload demands. Hypervisors provide the interface for such tools to interact with physical hardware and VMs efficiently.
Scaling and Orchestration:
Hypervisors work in conjunction with orchestration tools like Kubernetes, which manage containerised applications. This synergy ensures that applications can scale seamlessly and maintain high availability.
Self-Healing Systems:
In automated environments, self-healing systems detect failures and automatically take corrective actions, such as restarting VMs or migrating workloads to healthy nodes. Hypervisors facilitate these processes by providing the necessary abstraction and control.
However, this has to be kept in mind that these are all self managed configurations and not default setting. These must be enabled while setting up the base hypervisor itself.
Hypervisors in Cloud Computing Architecture:
Hypervisors are the backbone of modern computing, enabling efficient resource utilisation, enhanced security, and the dynamic scaling necessary for cloud computing.
Hypervisors play a critical role in virtualisation and serve as a foundation for containerisation, making them indispensable in contemporary IT infrastructure.
Furthermore, the automation capabilities facilitated by hypervisors drive efficiency and reliability in managing complex environments, underscoring their importance in the ongoing evolution of cloud and enterprise computing.
With all the hustle bustle of AI and stuff we to forget the foundation technologies what we are based on. We can have all the high end hardware with highest level of computing but if the link that joins hardware and software is unstable, no high end tech can succeed.
As technology continues to advance, hypervisors will remain a vital component, supporting the seamless operation and growth of digital services and applications.
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Kamalika Majumder
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