Understanding Hyperlight, Microsofts minimal VM manager [Video]

Microsoft is making its Rust-based, functions-focused VM tool available on Azure at last, ready to help event-driven applications at scale.

Credit: Vlue/Shutterstock

Windows support for virtualization-based security was one key driver, with new paravisor-based features in Hyper-V’s Krypton binding platform and virtual machines together so that users didn’t know that they were using code running in a VM. Security has driven many other recent virtualization developments, with tools like OpenHCL providing a framework for a virtualization-based trusted execution environment.

Modern virtual machines for serverless computing

There’s another increasingly important place where VMs are important. In the cloud-native and serverless computing world, we need to be able to launch code fast to scale with demand and support scaling down to zero when necessary. This is how we run data centers economically, ensuring we don’t need to keep loads running in case a user needs them.

We need to be able to launch small elements of functionality in microseconds, fast enough that users don’t …