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New Xen Project Partner Hyper Allows Developers To Leverage Docker Technology

Russell Pavlicek

Russell Pavlicek

— 3 min read

Company to Present its New Open Source Project at Xen Project Developer Summit and ContainerCon

SAN FRANCISCO, July 20, 2015–The Xen Project Collaborative Project hosted at The Linux Foundation today announced a partnership with Hyper, a company offering an open source project that allows developers to run Docker images with Xen Project virtualization. Based in China, the company will be presenting “Hyper: Make VM Run Like Containers” at Xen Project Developer Summit, Aug. 17-18. The Hyper Project allows developers to run Docker images with any Xen hypervisor Xen 4.5 or later and is available for download here.

“Hyper offers the best of both worlds — VMs and containers,” said Xu Wang, Co-Founder at Hyper. “Our technology allows enterprises to leverage any mature, implemented virtualization infrastructure and eliminate unwanted complexity and also take advantage of container technology to easily package applications. We looking forward to partnering with Xen more closely, helping developers get more out of their hypervisor, while also enjoying the benefits of container technology.”

As a bronze sponsor for The Linux Foundation’s new ContainerCon event, Hyper will also gather in Seattle with leading contributors in Linux containers, the Linux kernel, and related projects to forge a path to continued innovation and education.

Enabling the Next-Generation Container-as-a-Service

Caas (Container-as-a-Service) is gaining traction in cloud computing by leveraging the portability of Docker to avoid various technical limitations in a Platform-as-a-Service. However, the shared kernel approach introduces unnecessary complexity, overcapacity and security insecurity.

To eliminate these problems, Hyper uses virtualization to achieve hardware-enforced isolation. Unlike a VM + container approach, Hyper does not employ a GuestOS in the VM instance. Instead a HyperKernel, a customized Linux Kernel which includes Docker functionality, is loaded to host the Docker images. Hyper guests also does not require any Linux Container technology: in other words in Hyper guests do not require LXC, cgroups, namespace and  Docker daemon to run; they only require MOUNT namespace to support pods of Docker images.

This minimalist approach offers the following features and benefits:

  • Sub-second Boot: it takes milliseconds to launch a new Hyper VM with a pod of Docker images
  • Enhanced Security: much leaner and smaller attack surfaces for each VM minimizes potential flaws that can be exploited.
  • Minimal Resource Footprint and Overheads: leading to higher VM density per server.
  • Production Ready: virtualization like Xen is mature and proven with features like Live Migration, SDN, SDS, and has been battle-tested for years. With Hyper, developers can just plug-and-play and can use existing hypervisor functionality such as SDN support out-of-the box.
  • Immutable VM: by eliminating the need for Guest Operating Systems, there are no moving parts inside of a HyperVM to manage and configure, since the entire stack is fixed.
  • Rapid ROI: instead of rebuilding everything with containers, Hyper provides a seamless migration path from existing virtual infrastructure to containers.

“Continuous innovation is the lifeblood of any project. Xen Project is fortunate to have an extremely active and growing community,” said Lars Kurth, Xen Project Advisory Board Chairman. “By partnering with Hyper, Xen is looking ahead to the growing security, performance and scalability demands developers are facing as cloud and computing infrastructure evolves. It’s exciting to see Hyper deliver Xen support and improve upon existing container technologies in the market.”    

Additional Resources

Details on Hyper’s Xen Project Developer Summit presentation: http://xendevsummit2015.sched.org/event/add4ce535fb8c83963177690e1f602ce  
Getting Started with Hyper: https://docs.hyper.sh/get_started/install.html
How Hyper Works: https://docs.hyper.sh/how_it_works.html
Why Hyper: https://docs.hyper.sh/why_hyper.html
Docker, Hyper and the end of Guest OS: https://hyper.sh/blog/post/2015/06/29/docker-hyper-and-the-end-of-guest-os.html

About Hyper

Hyper is an open source hypervisor-agnostic Docker runtime published under the Apache License. It allows developers to run Docker images in virtual machines (VMs) on top of any hypervisor, but without the need of a guest OS. Hyper aims to deliver secure Container-as-a-Service to the masses, by combining the best from both worlds: it is as fast as a container based solution and inherits the isolation and security properties of traditional virtualization. We believe Hyper will enable the next-generation CaaS. Please visit www.hyper.sh.

About Xen Project

Xen Project software is an open source virtualization platform licensed under the GPLv2 with a similar governance structure to the Linux kernel. Designed from the start for cloud computing, the Project has more than a decade of development and is being used by more than 10 million users. A Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation, the Xen Project community is focused on advancing virtualization in a number of different commercial and open source applications including server virtualization, Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS), desktop virtualization, security applications, embedded and hardware appliances. It counts many industry and open source community leaders among its members including: Amazon Web Services, AMD, ARM, Bromium, Cavium, Citrix, Google, Intel, NetApp, Oracle, Rackspace, and Verizon Terremark. For more information about the Xen Project software and to participate, please visit XenProject.org.

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Media Contact
Sarah Conway
Xen Project
978-578-5300
sconway@linuxfoundation.org

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