Qemu + KVM is the future of open source virtualization

Open source virtualization has been evolving dramatically over the last few years. Incumbent proprietary platforms such as VMWare still hold the throne in many areas but open source competitors are gaining ground fast on their way to ubiquity. Things are a-changing in the land of virtualization.

Right now we have three contenders to the (open source) throne battling it out for supremacy:

  • Xen: backed by Citrix
  • VirtualBox: backed by Oracle/Sun
  • KVM: backed by RedHat
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Amazon EC2 metadata - Python library and CLI

Each Amazon EC2 instance has associated metadata, as well as user data supplied when launching the instance. The meta and user data is instance-specific, and therefore only accessible to the instance.

The data is useful on several levels, such as configuring SSH public keys, programmatically configuring the instance according to certain criteria, or even executing user supplied initialization scripts.
 

Exploring S3 based filesystems S3FS and S3Backer

In the last couple of days I've been researching Amazon S3 based filesystems, to figure out if maybe we could integrate that into an easy to use backup solution for TurnKey Linux appliances.

Note that S3 could only be a part of the solution. It wouldn't be a good idea to rely exclusively on S3 based automatic backups because of the problematic security architecture it creates. If an attacker compromises your server, he can easily compromise and subvert or destroy any S3 based automatic backups. That's bad news.

2009.10 release: 40 appliances with VMDK and Amazon EC2 support

We're proud to announce the 2009.10 release batch featuring:

  • 25 new additions to the TurnKey Linux virtual appliance library
  • Added native virtual appliance packaging (OVF support included)
  • Amazon EC2 support, with EBS persistence
  • Core improvements: Ajax web shell, upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04.3

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