InfoQ Homepage Virtual Machines Content on InfoQ
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Amazon Announces New Bare Metal EC2 Instances
AWS recently announced new bare metal instances for Amazon EC2. The new M5n, M5dn, R5n, and R5dn instances are already available and can utilize up to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth.
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Canonical Releases Ubuntu Core 20 for Iot Devices and Embedded Systems
Canonical released a minimal containerised version of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS specifically for IoT devices and embedded systems. Ubuntu Core is an operating system for industry and consumer devices. It is available for both x86 and ARM computers. Additional features compared to previous Core operating systems are secure boot, full drive encryption, and secure device recovery.
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GraalVM 21.0 Introduces a JVM Written in Java
GraalVM has released major version 21.0 with a new component, Java on Truffle, that provides a JVM implementation written in Java. GraalVM is itself a polyglot virtual machine that provides a shared runtime to execute applications in multiple languages. Java on Truffle, a JVM written in Java using the Truffle framework, provides a new option to run Java applications. Its code name is Espresso.
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Recap of AWS re:Invent 2020
This year the annual re:invent conference organized by AWS was virtual, free and three weeks long. During multiple keynotes and sessions, AWS announced new features, improvements and cloud services. Here is a review of the main announcements impacting compute, database, storage, networking, machine learning and development.
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AWS Introduces New Instance Types for Amazon EC2
AWS recently announced new instance types for Amazon EC2 on different processors and for different EC2 families. Most of the new instances are already available, even if only in a subset of regions; others are expected by the end of the month.
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AWS Introduces Nitro Enclaves, Isolated EC2 Environments for Confidential Computing
AWS has recently made available Nitro Enclaves, isolated EC2 environments to process confidential data. Based on a lightweight Linux OS, a Nitro Enclave is a hardened, attested and highly constrained virtual machine.
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Microsoft Introduces Its Quantum Intermediate Representation
Based on LLVM, IBM Quantum Intermediate Representation (QIR) extends LLVM IR to better suit the representation of quantum constructs.
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Google Announces New Features Making It Easier to Manage Windows Server VMs
Recently Google announced several new features such as boot-screen diagnostics, auto-upgrade for Windows Server, new diagnostics tooling, and improved license reporting. Most of these updates are available in beta and intend to simplify troubleshooting problems, upgrading, and managing the license requirements of Windows workloads running on Google Cloud (GCP).
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Google Announces General Availability of CPU Overcommit for Sole Tenant Nodes
In a recent blog post, Google announced that CPU overcommit for sole-tenant nodes is generally available. With CPU overcommit for sole-tenant nodes, customers can over-provision their dedicated host virtual CPU resources by up to two times.
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Google Launches Confidential VMs in Beta on Its Cloud Platform
In a recent blog post, Google announced Confidential VMs, a new type of virtual machine that makes use of the company’s work around confidential computing to ensure that data isn’t just encrypted at rest but also while it is in memory.
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WebAssembly Extended with Hot Reloading, Remote Debugging and Uniform Hardware Access
Researchers recently presented WARDuino, an extension to WebAssembly targeting microcontrollers. WARDuino addresses common development pain points by adding live code updates, remote debugging, and access to the microcontroller’s hardware modules. WARDuino’s virtual machine runs five times faster than Espruino (a popular JavaScript interpreter for microcontrollers) on some benchmarks.
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Microsoft Announces the General Availability of DCsv2-VM from Azure Confidential Computing
Recently, Microsoft announced the general availability of DCsv2-series virtual machines (VMs). With these VMs, customers can deliver applications that protect data while in use.
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Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability with Improved Update Process
Microsoft announced that Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) will be generally available in Windows 10, version 2004. WSL2 was released into the Insider Program last year. With the move to general availability, WSL2 can now be automatically updated via standard Windows Updates.
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Google Propeller Squeezes Extra Performance from Large-Scale LLVM Binaries
Google Propeller is able to improve the performance of LLVM binaries by relinking and optimizing them based on a profile of their behaviour at runtime. Propeller can bring 2-9% improvements on key performance benchmarks for binaries that were previously highly optimized by LLVM, say Google engineers.
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Google Introduces Machine Images to Simplify Making and Restoring Virtual Machines
In a recent blog post, Google announced machine images, a new type of Compute Engine resource containing all the information users need to create, backup or restore a virtual machine, and thus reducing the amount of time required for managing environments. The feature in Compute Engine is currently in beta, and not covered by any SLA or deprecation policy.