A series of events have been unfolding over the past nine months that leads one to speculate on what Amazon will be doing in the future with its EC2 infrastructure. For those not aware, EC2 is built upon an Amazon customized version of the Xen Hypervisor plus Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 code.
Here goes my speculation: Taking from where Drue Reeves left off in his blog on this subject earlier this year, Amazon has got to be looking for a way to reduce its engineering maintenance investment into the EC2 infrastructure. What better way than to partner with a technology supplier. The announcement on May 6th at Synergy of Citrix-Amazon collaboration on internal/external cloud interoperability has “we’re moving to Citrix XenServer as our EC2 hypervisor infrastructure” written all over it. Let’s look at some interesting points:
• XenServer with live migration is now free. Amazon has got to like “free.”
• Citrix is collaborating on the same API and hopefully AMI as EC2
• RedHat is abandoning Xen in favor of KVM (see Drue’s blog)
Amazon can continue to use Red Hat Linux as the guest operating system for EC2 as Citrix and the community will supply Xen paravirtualized device drivers moving forward.
So what do you think?
[Posted by Richard Jones]
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