<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Gigaom]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[http://gigaom.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[Barb Darrow]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[http://search.gigaom.com/author/barbdarrow/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[Google gets chatty about live migration while AWS stays mum]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p>On Monday, Amazon wanted us to know that its staff worked day and night to avert<a href="https://gigaom.com/2015/02/27/xen-security-issue-prompts-amazon-rackspace-cloud-reboots/"> planned reboots </a>of cloud instances and <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/maintenance-2015-03/">updated a blog post </a>to flag that information. But it didn&#8217;t provide any specifics on how these live updates were implemented.</p>
<p>Did <a href="https://search.gigaom.com/company/amazon/">Amazon</a> use<a href="https://gigaom.com/2014/10/12/is-live-migration-coming-to-amazon-web-services-smart-money-says-yes/"> live migration</a> &#8212; a process in which the guest OS is moved to a new, safe host? Or did it use <a href="https://gigaom.com/2015/01/10/for-cloud-players-hot-patching-may-be-hotter-than-live-migration/">hot patching</a> in which dynamic kernel updates are applied without screwing around with the underlying system?</p>
<p>Who knows? Because Amazon Web Services ain&#8217;t saying. Speculation is that it used live migration &#8212; even though AWS proponents last fall insisted that <a href="https://gigaom.com/2014/10/12/is-live-migration-coming-to-amazon-web-services-smart-money-says-yes/">live migration </a>per se would not have prevented the<a href="https://gigaom.com/2014/09/25/amazon-confirms-that-ec2-reboots-are-due-to-xen-issues/"> Xen-related reboots</a> it launched at that time.</p>
<p>But where AWS remains quiet, <a href="https://search.gigaom.com/company/google/">Google</a>, which wants to challenge AWS for public cloud workloads, was <a href="http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/03/Google-Compute-Engine-uses-Live-Migration-technology-to-service-infrastructure-without-application-downtime.html">only too glad to blog </a>about <em>its</em> <a href="https://gigaom.com/2014/03/25/and-bam-google-cuts-on-demand-prices-by-a-third-demos-live-migration-for-its-cloud/">live migration</a> capabilities launched last year. Live migration, it claimed on Tuesday, prevented a meltdown during the <a href="https://gigaom.com/2014/04/08/heres-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-heartbleed-web-security-flaw/">Heartbleed vulnerability hullabaloo</a> in April.</p>
<p>Google&#8217;s post is replete with charts and graphs and eight-by-ten glossies. Kidding about the last part but there are lots of diagrams.</p>
<p>A betting person might wager that Google is trying to tweak Amazon on this front by oversharing. You have to credit Google&#8217;s moxie here and its aspirations for live migration remain large. Per the Google Cloud Platform blog:</p>
<blockquote id="quote-the-goal-of-live-mig"><p>The goal of live migration is to keep hardware and software updated across all our data centers without restarting customers&#8217; VMs. Many of these maintenance events are disruptive. They require us to reboot the host machine, which, in the absence of transparent maintenance, would mean impacting customers’ VMs.</p></blockquote>
<p>But Google still has a long row to hoe. Last fall, when Google started <a href="https://gigaom.com/2014/10/16/live-migration-wont-help-google-cloud-customers-moving-to-new-european-zone/">deprecating an older cloud data center zone </a>in Europe and launched a new one, there was no evidence of live migration. Customers were told to make a disk snapshots and use them to relaunch new VMs in the new zone.</p>
<p>As reported then, Google live migration moves working VMs between physical hosts <em>within</em> zones but not <em>between</em> them. Google promised changes there too, starting in late January 2015 but there appears to be nothing new on that front as yet.</p>
<p>So let the cloud games continue.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
]]></html><thumbnail_url><![CDATA[https://i2.wp.com/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/istock_000024678052_large.jpg?fit=440%2C330&quality=80&strip=all]]></thumbnail_url><thumbnail_height><![CDATA[330]]></thumbnail_height><thumbnail_width><![CDATA[440]]></thumbnail_width></oembed>