What if all the software layers in a virtual appliance were compiled within the same safe, high-level language framework?

摘要

Anil Madhavapeddy and David J. Scott Cloud computing has been pioneering the business of renting computing resources in large data centers to multiple (and possibly competing) tenants. The basic enabling technology for the cloud is operating-system virtualization such as Xen~(1) or VMWare, which allows customers to multiplex VMs (virtual machines) on a shared cluster of physical machines. Each VM presents as a self-contained computer, booting a standard operating-system kernel and running unmodified applications just as if it were executing on a physical machine. A key driver of the growth of cloud computing in the early days was server consolidation . Existing applications were often installed on physical hosts that were individually underutilized, and virtualization made it feasible to pack them onto fewer hosts without requiring any modifications or code recompilation. VMs are also managed via software APIs rather than physical actions.