InfoQ Homepage Virtual Machines Content on InfoQ
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Google Introduces Low-Priced Preemptible GPUs for Their Customers
Google announces the beta release of Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) attached to Preemptible Virtual Machines (VMs) in their cloud Platform. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers can now attach NVIDIA K80 and NVIDIA P100 GPUs to Preemptible VMs for respectively 0.22 and 0.73 dollar cent per GPU hour, 50 percent cheaper than GPUs connected to on-demand instances.
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Using Cloud Sandboxes to “Shift Left” Testing within Production-Like Environments
InfoQ recently sat down with Joan Wrabetz, CTO at Quali, and discussed the role ‘cloud sandboxes’ can take within the modern software development lifecycle (SDLC). Cloud sandboxes allow a user to create and publish replicas of infrastructure and application configurations for on-demand usage. The primary use cases for cloud sandboxes include development and quality assurance testing.
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Microsoft Announces Azure Price Cut
In a recent Microsoft Azure blog post, the company announced a price cut due in early February. This announcement follows an Amazon announcement on January 5th, 2016 which saw price cuts to Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 C4, M4 and R3 virtual machine instances.
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Amazon Announces EC2 Dedicated Hosts Availability
Last month, Amazon announced EC2 Dedicated Hosts are now generally available. Amazon initially discussed EC2 Dedicated Hosts at its Re:Invent conference in October. Using this new service, customers will have the ability to map Virtual Machines (VMs) to a physical host which runs in AWS.
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Microsoft Azure Scale Sets in Public Preview
In a recent blog post, Mark Russinovich, cto of Microsoft Azure, announced a public preview feature called Azure Scale Sets. Azure Scale Sets are an Azure Compute resource which allow you to deploy and manage a group of virtual machines (VMs) as a collective group, or set.
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Elixir Hits 1.1, Brings new APIs, Build-time Improvements
One year after hitting 1.0, Elixir 1.1 is out. It brings new public APIs, performance improvements, and tooling improvements. InfoQ has spoken with José Valim, Elixir’s creator.
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Google Preemptible Virtual Machines are now out of Beta
A few months after its beta launch, Google has announced the general availability of preemptible virtual machines as part of the Google Compute Engine cloud. Preemptible VMs have a lower price than other types of VMs that Google offers, but they can be shut down at any moment by Google with a 30 sec warning.
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OpenBSD to Receive Native Hypervisor
OpenBSD has long-lacked support to host virtual machines on the X86/X64 platforms. OpenBSD developer Mike Larkin seeks to change that through his new project to bring a native hypervisor to this operating system, giving it the ability to host virtual machines natively.
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Oracle Proposes G1 as the Default Garbage Collector for Java 9
Oracle is considering including JEP 248, making G1 the default garbage collector on server configurations, into the list of JEPs targeting Java 9. The decision has triggered some debate among the Java community, with many arguing that the CMS collector could have been more suitable.
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VENOM Vulnerability Threatens Several Major VM Hosts
Users of the popular virtual machine tools Xen, KVM, VirtualBox, and QEMU are urged to patch their systems as soon as possible due to a newly found bug that exposes flaws in the code providing virtual floppy disk support. The VENOM vulnerability affects all operating systems that are hosting these environments.
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Comparing Virtual Machines and Linux Containers Performance
IBM Research Division has published a paper comparing the performance of container and virtual machine environments, using Docker and KVM, highlighting the cost of using Docker with NAT or AUFS, and questioning the practice of running containers inside of virtual machines.
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Google Cuts Cloud Prices, Integrates CI Tools, Supports Windows and Manages VMs
Google had a Cloud Platform Live event on Tuesday (recorded here) unveiling a number of new features, improvements and a new pricing model.
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FutureOps with Immutable Infrastructures and Built-in Failure Recovery
Mitchell Hashimoto, creator of Vagrant, gave a talk last month at Velocity Conf London about his vision for a “FutureOps” with immutable infrastructures and built-in failure recovery.
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Ceylon Is Feature Complete
Gavin King, leader of the Ceylon project, has announced the availability of M6 release, which has also been tagged as Ceylon 1.0 Beta, the language been considered feature complete. This release includes complete language specification, a command-line toolset – compilers for JVM and JavaScript VMs, documentation compiler –, an SDK, and an Eclipse-based IDE.
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Windows Azure with SQL AlwaysOn, Notification Hubs, AutoScale, Enhancements to VM and Load Balancer
Microsoft recently updated Windows Azure with support for SQL Server AlwaysOn, notification hubs, autoscale, virtual machines in addition to a new portal extension for operation logs and alerts.