Cloudius pioneers first operating system designed for cloud

NEW ORLEANS, USA: Cloudius Systems today announced an open source approach to application deployment.

The new open source project, OSV, is designed to run efficiently on top of hypervisors, allowing operating systems (OS) 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.

"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."

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," added Burns.

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."