Increased virtualization performance with the AWS Nitro System
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). EC2 is a web service that provides resizable, on-demand computing capacity — literally, servers in Amazon’s data centers — that you use to build and host your software. It’s important to understand that EC2 is a virtual computing environment. In a virtual environment, there is one physical server with all of the necessary hardware — CPU, memory, hard disk, network controller and more. This single physical server can host multiple operating systems and applications through a hypervisor that runs directly on top of the physical machine. The following simplified diagram shows a hypervisor architecture based on the Xen project: Xen interfaces directly with the hardware, and has a special control domain (dom0) for interfacing with Xen. Domain 0 is designed to access hardware directly and manage devices and device drivers. It has the ability to talk to the hypervisor to instruct it to start and stop guest VMs. ...