RedMonk principal analyst and co-founder Stephen O’Grady talks virtual machines (VMs) in this quickish take, outlining what they are, high-points in VM history, major players in the space, how containerization and Kubernetes shook up the infrastructure landscape, and why VMs continue to matter in 2024.

 

 

Transcript

Kate: Hello, I am Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at Redmonk, and we’re here to talk VMs. What even are they? Why did they take over the world? How come Kubernetes killed them? Here to discuss how we got here is principal analyst at Redmonk and co -founder, Steven O ‘Grady. So can you help us to better understand why VMs matter in the infrastructure landscape in 2024?

Steve: Sure, I can take a quick stab at that. Before I get in, let me give a couple caveats because I know there’s going be people who are listening to this who are probably wrote some of these technologies. So we’re going to do this in a couple of minutes. So I’m going to compress like 60 years of technical development into a couple of minutes. So that means things are going to get skipped. Some favorite technology is going to get left out and so on. just bear with us. We’re trying to breeze through some quick history here. And I’m going to oversimplify some things.

Basically, the history of virtualization, the history of VMs to me goes back to the 1960s. So we have the IBM 360 mainframe. And for those younger listeners who may not know what a mainframe is, it’s a giant big computer. We still have them, but they’re much less common. Anyhow, so the software that was written for that was CP. It CP -40, and I think the other one was CP -67. And so they offer what was called time sharing.

So was the idea that each user would essentially dial in and get their own instance of an operating system to work with. So virtualization has been around and VMs have been around forever. So as long as we’ve had computers. So 1970s, things keep going. 1980s -ish, VMs kind of fall out of fashion for a couple of reasons. So we had a hardware revolution. So we went from mainframes, these giant big computers, to mini computers, which were smaller.

to the client server era, which is of smaller, more smaller servers, sort of build out. And then on the consumer side, we had PCs. So when you have lot of little machines, you don’t necessarily need to carve up the big ones into sort of virtual pieces. So VMs kind of, I mean, they were still around, but they took a less of a, it took something of a backseat. So in the nineties, they sort of begin coming back. Consumer side, you had things like virtual PC and so on.

VMware was founded, I think, in 98, if I remember that right. And then we have the development of ESX. I think it was 2000, 2001, that -ish timeframe. That gave us enterprise virtualization. Zen followed shortly after that an open source bare metal hypervisor. shortly after that, we had Intel and AMD and other manufacturers bake virtualization capabilities into the actual hardware itself. After that, we had KVM, which was a software VM layer that entered the Linux kernel, Hyper -V for Microsoft. Anyway, we go on and on with some of these technologies. But the backdrop here is two big things were happening, first one and then the other. The first big one is cloud. Obviously, Amazon launched the sort cloud revolution, if you will, with EC2 in 2006. I can’t remember the time, I think was in August. EC2, sort of in the early days was based on Zen, that open source hypervisor that we mentioned, since replaced by things like Nitro and so on. And things have continued to evolve sort of over there. And so all of a sudden, we had this notion of using virtualization to power what we all know today as a cloud, to have all these sort of virtual instances.

And so that continues to this day. It’s not necessarily on the original technologies. Like I said, I mentioned Nitro, there’s things like Firecracker, Google has its own stack, Microsoft has some Hyper -V variants and so on. So everyone’s doing a little differently, but virtualization is the basis of the cloud. But in 2013, Docker provided a sort of simple, quick way to manage containers via LXC and the Linux kernel.

And all of sudden, containers totally blew up because they were lighter weight than VMs because you’re not essentially repurposing all the redundant parts of an operating system. You’re sharing them amongst different containers and only sort of packaging up the pieces that you need for a given application. So developers were like, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. They took off. That meant there needed to be a management solution. So there were whole bunch of options, Kubernetes, Mesosphere, Swarm, and all these different things.

Kubernetes wins out which brings us to today. So kind of where we’re at today is VMs are the underpinning of sort of the cloud infrastructure. That’s kind of what we all rely on. And then, you know, most sort of large enterprises at least are using containers sort of as the, it’s not a VM per se, but using sort of a VM like container containing structure to package up and sort of distribute and manage and operate their applications. So we have VMs at the bottom, containers sit on top of them, and that’s kind of where we’re at. So, you who knows, know, virtualization sort of of all types, you know, keeps, you know, keeps going. And I’ve left out all sorts of things like, you know, virtual networking and emulators and, you know, there’s a million different sort of virtualization variants, you know, that we could talk about, but that’s the sort very, very short history of virtualization and sort of how we got to today.

Kate: All right, that has been a quickish take on VMs with Stephen O ‘Grady. Again, my name is Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at Redmonk. if you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe, and review the MonkCast on your podcast platform of choice. If you’re watching us on YouTube, please like, subscribe, and engage with us in the comments.