[Guest Post by Uri Wolloch, Co-Founder and CTO at N2Ws]

This article discusses the recent change that has taken place with AWS EC2 virtualization options. We will look into AWS’ virtualization backend and what it means for AWS users in general and N2WS, in particular. For a bit of background, up until recently, the AWS cloud supported a virtualization type called Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM) for Windows instances as well as ParaVirtualization (PV) for Linux instances. While these are both Xen technologies, they are slightly different. PV requires an added layer of software (i.e. kernel) between the designated hardware and virtual machines, and HVM runs directly on hardware and can make use of special hardware extensions.

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