Lars Kurth had his first contact with the open source community in 1997 when he worked on various parts of the ARM toolchain. He has since become an open source enthusiasts, worked on several open source communities, and is the chairperson of the Xen Project Advisory Board. He is also the Director of the Xen Project at Citrix.
He recently sat down to discuss why Xen Project software makes sense for the cloud and where the community and technology is heading this year in this short video. Read on for more.
The Xen Project community has flourished and grown throughout the years. The latest release from the Xen Project (Hypervisor 4.6) produced the best quality and quantity of contributors from cloud providers, software vendors, hardware vendors, academic researchers and individuals.
The Xen Project entices new users to join with its high energy and inclusive nature. It periodically hosts hackathons to give developers the opportunity to meet face to face, to discuss development, coordinate, write code, and collaborate with other developers. The Project will have its next hackathon at ARM’s headquarters in Cambridge on April 18 – 19.
Since the Xen Project became a collaborative project under the Linux Foundation tutelage in 2013, the technology has been able to break into a lot of new use cases, most notably automotive and embedded — check out GlobalLogic’s use of Xen on Linux.com if you haven’t read it already. These recent innovations areas have also been very beneficial to traditional Xen Project use cases. For example, Automotive real-time scheduling is not only important for this industry, but server and data centers as they relate to things like online gaming.
From it’s inception, Xen was created for cloud computing — its early work with Amazon AWS allowed the hypervisor to create a great architecture for the cloud. It has since brought on a lot of new members and contributors to help continue to address the current and future needs of cloud computing, and will continue to innovate in new market segments from automotive to Unikernels.
