AWS Hypervisor

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a few months ago announced about a new hypervisor based on KVM it had created. This was made public during the unveiling of a new EC2 instance “C5” which is powered by Intel’s Skylake Xeons. Managed AWS till recent times was using the Xen hypervisor.
 
Hypervisors enable multiple virtual machines to be hosted on a single physical hardware. They come with the variables that are needed to make the virtual machines work. Both Kernel-Based Virtual Machine and Xen are open-source hypervisors used for virtualizing compute infrastructure that runs on x86 compatible hardware.
 
The new hypervisor for AWS EC2 is a component that delivers memory isolation and CPU for all the C5 instances. It is built on the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine technology. It does not include the operating system components which mean the storage and network are not being done on the hypervisor.
 
The instances that run on the new KVM EC2 hypervisor has the capacity to support about 27 more PCI devices for VPC ENIs and EBS volumes.
 
AWS has been till now using the XEN hypervisor on the bare metal which is offered in two ways. One is the HVM (Hardware Virtual Machine) and the other is PV (Paravirtualization). HVM guests are totally virtualized. This means the VMs that run on top of the hypervisors are unaware of their sharing with other clients on the same hardware. PV is slightly different. The operating system requires modification before it can work.