OSv: A New Open Source Operating System Designed for the Cloud

Scale out is the key requirement behind most modern workloads. As a result cloud deployments are executing homogeneous clusters of virtual machines, running single applications within them, such as NoSQL, MemCache, front/backend servers, etc. The operating system that drives these applications within the guest virtual machine doesn't do any of its traditional roles—there isn't any hardware, users, or multiple apps. OSv is designed from the ground up to execute a single application on top of a hypervisor, resulting in superior performance and effortless management. Extreme optimizations are performed to minimize the hypervisor overhead, autotune for size and integrate with the Java Virtual Machine implementation. The OS itself is stateless and offers a simple API to manage any aspect remotely, making it perfect for virtual machine images.