Fueling innovative software
July 15-18, 2019
Portland, OR

Building the virtualization stack of the future

Diana-Maria Popa (Amazon), Radu Weiss (Amazon)
9:35am–10:00am Tuesday, July 16, 2019
Open Source, Open@Amazon , Sponsored
 Location: F150/151
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)

Rust-vmm is an open source project that designs, implements, and vends a set of secure and efficient virtualization building blocks. Rust-vmm aims to improve the security and development velocity of existing or newly crafted VMMs and to create a shared space for contributing to the core VMM components that all teams working in this space can leverage, such as kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) API wrappers, virtio-based device models, or virtual machine memory libraries.

Diana-Maria Popa and Radu Weiss try to answer the controversial question of whether or not the world needs more VMMs by exploring the fundamentals of building VMMs and explaining why Rust is the right programming language for VMMs. They outline the advantages and trade-offs of how different open source projects use rust-vmm crates to build virtualization products and prototypes.

Photo of Diana-Maria Popa

Diana-Maria Popa

Amazon

Diana-Maria Popa is a software development engineer at AWS. Over the past two years, she’s been part of the team that owns Firecracker, an open source virtualization technology that’s purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multitenant container and function-based services that provide serverless operational models. Firecracker runs workloads in lightweight virtual machines, called microVMs, which combine the security and isolation properties provided by hardware virtualization technology with the speed and flexibility of containers. It already powers AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate, and is being integrated with compute stacks such as Kubernetes (via Kata Containers and containerd).

Photo of Radu Weiss

Radu Weiss

Amazon

Radu Weiss is a software development manager at AWS. Over the past five years, he’s worked to deliver compute and data protection platforms that enable low-latency, cost-effective, and trusted offerings for Amazon’s customers. He’s part of the team that owns Firecracker, an open source virtualization technology that’s purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multitenant container and function-based services that provide serverless operational models. Firecracker runs workloads in lightweight virtual machines, called microVMs, which combine the security and isolation properties provided by hardware virtualization technology with the speed and flexibility of containers. It already powers AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate, and is being integrated with compute stacks such as Kubernetes (via Kata Containers and containerd). He’s available through email if you want to get in touch.