Xen Project Contributor Spotlight: Mike Latimer

The Xen Project is comprised of a diverse set of member companies and contributors that are committed to the growth and success of the Xen Project Hypervisor. The Xen Project Hypervisor is a staple technology for server and cloud vendors, and is gaining traction in the embedded, security and automotive space. This blog series highlights the companies contributing to the changes and growth being made to the Xen Project and how the Xen Project technology bolsters their business.

Name: Mike Latimer
Title: Senior Engineering Manager, Virtualization Team
Company: SUSE

When did you start contributing to the Xen Project?
I first started working with the Xen Project in 2006 as a backline support engineer for SUSE. That role required working closely with SUSE’s virtualization development team to identify, debug and resolve Xen related issues our customers encountered. At that time, I was a silent contributor to the project as I leveraged the various Xen Project community mailing lists to increase my understanding of the project and contributed back through my engagements with our internal Xen developers. Some years later, I moved to engineering and worked directly with the Xen Project and related tooling. I now manage SUSE’s Virtualization Team and contribute through my own coding and QA related efforts, and also by ensuring our engineers have the resources they need to be active in the Xen Project.
How does contributing to the Xen Project benefit your company?
The Xen Project is an example of a very complex project which is successful due to a thriving and diverse community. Our membership in this community provides engineers an incredible opportunity to increase their own skills through peer review of their code, and directly observing how other engineers approach and resolve problems. This interaction between highly skilled engineers results in better engineers and better engineered products. In other words, it’s a win all around. SUSE benefits both by having a quality product we can offer to our customers and by the continual improvement our engineers experience.
How does the Xen Project’s technology help your business?
Internally, SUSE (and our parent company Micro Focus) relies on all forms of virtualization to provide many critical infrastructure components. Key services such as dns/dhcp servers, web servers, and various applications servers are commonly ran in Xen VMs. Additionally, Xen is an important part of the tooling used to build our distributions. For example, the well known Open Build Service infrastructure (which performs automated building of RPMs) uses Xen VMs for a portion of the builds.
SUSE prides itself on providing quality products that our customers need to resolve real-world challenges. Xen was doing this when we first included it in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 (in 2006), and continues to do this today as Xen will be included in SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 (to be released in 2018). Xen has been an important differentiating factor with our distribution, and customer feedback has verified the value that they see in this offering.
What are some of the major changes you see with virtualization and the transition to cloud native computing?
In my opinion, the death of the hypervisor has been greatly exaggerated. While it is true that cloud computing has taken users one step away from the hypervisor, the role of the hypervisor has never been more important. As more and more applications move to cloud-based services, the underlying hypervisor will be expected to “just work” with everything required by those applications. This means that advanced functionality like device-passthrough, NUMA optimizations, and support for the latest CPU instructions will be expected to be available in cloud environments.
Of course, security is of paramount importance, and performance can’t be sacrificed either. Meeting these expectations, while continuing to provide core functionality (such as live migration, save/restore, snapshots, etc.) will be challenging, but the architecture of the Xen Project provides the stable foundation for today’s requirements, and the flexibility to adapt to new requirements as the cloud world continues to evolve.
What advice would you give someone considering contributing to the Xen Project?
I would encourage anyone working with the Xen Project to become an _active_ member of the community. Start by following the mailing lists and joining in the conversation. It may seem intimidating to begin working with such a technically complex project, but the community is accepting and interested in what anyone has to say. Even if your contribution are simply ACK’ing patches, or providing test reports, all input is appreciated.
If you are considering submitting code to the project, my advice is to submit early and submit often! Engage with the community early in the development process to allow time for the community to feel joint ownership for the success of your code. Don’t be afraid of criticism, and don’t be afraid of standing up for your point of view. The Xen Project thrives with these discussions, and the outcome should never be viewed as a win/lose proposition. Everyone benefits when the most correct solution wins.
What excites you most about the future of Xen?
I’m most interested in seeing Xen continue to differentiate itself from other hypervisor offerings. The Xen architecture is ideal for environments which require high security and performance, so I’m particularly interested in advances in this area. The convergence of PV
and HVM guest models (into PVH and PVHVM) has been an exciting recent change, and there should be further advances which ensure both guest models are as performant as possible. I’m also looking forward to increases in fault tolerance through such things as a restartable dom0, and better support for driver stub domains. By continuing to improve in these areas, Xen will remain a strong choice in the ever changing field of virtualization.