Cloudius Systems Pioneers the First Operating System Designed for the Cloud

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloudius Systems today announced a breakthrough open source approach to application deployment. The new open source project, OSV, is designed to run efficiently on top of hypervisors, allowing operating systems to better optimize CPU consumption and overhead memory. By running on a single application, resulting in unparalleled throughput and latency, OSV minimizes operating costs by reducing the need for administration, template management, patching and tuning of applications. OSV has been developed by a team of OS veterans including Avi Kivity, Dor Laor, Benny Schnaider—creators of the KVM hypervisor.

The Need for a New OS

Unlike new infrastructure such as hypervisors, NoSQL, PaaS, etc., the operating system has been virtually unchanged since the introduction of cloud computing. Typical cloud workloads run application servers using Java, Ruby, Python and JavaScript (node.js). This historical evolution is not ideal – the run time (JVM), the OS and the hypervisor implement parallel/duplicated mechanisms for protection and abstraction. Together, these mechanisms are redundant and impose a large overhead in terms of CPU and memory…

“The public cloud era opens new opportunities for hi-tech businesses. As a result, the industry needs to address massively scaled out operating systems to run multiple copies of identical virtual machines,” said Paul Burns, president of Neovise. “VMs need to be lightweight, blazing fast, scalable and inexpensive, and any solution designed to do this has an incredible opportunity to disrupt the DevOps space.”

First Operating System Designed for the Cloud
OSV allows developers and IT administrators to deploy their application directly from the development environment (IDE) to the cloud, bypassing legacy deployments. OSV is completely stateless, applications are packaged as a single unit and are easily updated, in an orthogonal way for the rest of the system.

“The Java Virtual Machine, the OS (Linux) and the hypervisor implement similar mechanisms for protection and abstraction. These mechanisms impose a large overhead in terms of CPU cycles and memory footprint,” said Dor Laor, CEO of Cloudius Systems. “OSV is an emerging operating system that is optimized to run directly on top of the hypervisor.”

Key benefits include:

• Superior performance – OSV reduces the memory and CPU overhead imposed by traditional OS. Application throughput significantly increases while providing unparalleled short latencies and constant predictable performance. It all translates directly to massive saving in CAPEX by large reduction of the number of OS instances/sizes.
• Zero OS management – The bloated configurations of Linux daemons and kernel options are irrelevant or auto-tuned. OSV minimizes OPEX costs by eliminating the need for administration, template management, configuration and tuning. The OS itself is stateless.
• DevOps/PaaS deployment – OSV is designed to be deployed directly from a developer IDE either within the enterprise or directly to the cloud, just like the known PaaS solution.
• Common Java application optimization and integration – Frameworks such as Tomcat, JBoss, SpringSource are ideal for OSV. Common open source technologies such as Hadoop and NoSQL are being optimized and integrated to run on top of OSV.
• Not just Java – Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Scala, etc. are supported over the JVM.
• Optimize your ‘C’ apps – C code runs on top of OSv. Common projects such as MemCacheD, Redis, NGiNX, Mongo, etc. are a perfect match for the technology.