Briefing Notes: Ravello Systems, the Cloud Application Hypervisor Company

CloudStory met with Navin Thadani, SVP of Products at Ravello Systems, the Cloud Application Hypervisor company. Navin walked through a demo of their cool technology using which one can rapidly prototype cloud applications and deploy them across multiple clouds through button clicks. Here is the report

Company

Ravello Systems was founded in 2011 by the team that developed KVM and has offices in Palo Alto, California and Ra'anana Israel. They have strong expertise in virtualization, storage and networking with the team members from RedHat, Cisco, VmWare etc. They are funded by Sequoia, Bessemer and Norwest. They are currently in Beta.

Products

Ravello's flagship product is their Cloud Application Hypervisor which enables rapid prototyping and deploying a Cloud Application into multiple Cloud Service Providers. A Cloud Application is an abstraction of workloads. For example, an application could consist of Front End, Back End and Database virtual servers, all behind a load balancer and firewall.

Ravello dashboard enables one rapidly prototype your cloud application using a Visio kind of UI. It also allows you to import from your existing VmWare assets (vmdks) and deploy into multiple public clouds - AWS, Rackspace or HP Cloud. One can also drag n drop pre-built 'servers'. A server is a template with default hardware configuration (1 processor, 2 GB RAM, 1 NIC for example) and a pre-loaded software (Ubuntu 12.04.1 vanilla for example).

Once you build your application, Ravello dashboard also compiles a suitable network configuration which can be edited.

Ok, your application prototype is ready to be deployed now. Choose one of the cloud provider and publish (for instance AWS). In few minutes, your application is live!

You can also save this blueprint, create new application based on that blueprint and deploy on other provider (for instance Rackspace), without any changes. Check out the name of the provider circled in red on top. Isn't that cool?

Technology

Ravello's Cloud Application Hypervisor is built on top of High performance Nested Hypervisor called HVX and IO Overlays (Software Defined Networking and Storage). HVX runs with in the guest instances, providing an abstraction layer on top of multiple hypervisors (like KVM or Xen). HVX takes care of communicating to the hypervisor below, thereby enabling your VMs to remain unchanged irrespective of the hypervisor it is on.

Since there is an additional l

evel of translation and abstraction, there is some performance impact. IO bound workloads seem to have more impact than CPU bound, however, Navin believes that, this impact is less significant when compared to the acceleration it provides in bringing your cloud application to deployment. Ravello is also constantly fine tuning their binary translation capabilities and are expected to match hypervisor performance in coming iterations.

Summary

Ravello's has a strong Virtualization and Binary Translation expertise. Ravello's team has been there, done it and they are heading in right direction in their next round of hypervisor innovation. They have narrowed down representative use cases. We personally like Rapid Prototyping and Multi-Tier Testing use cases, which we think will impact DevOps. Please join their Beta and see for yourself!