Best Hypervisors for Amazon EC2

The AWS Nitro System is the foundation for the latest generation of Amazon EC2 instances, enabling AWS to innovate faster, reduce costs for customers, and deliver enhanced security and new instance types. By reimagining virtualization infrastructure, AWS has offloaded functions such as CPU, storage, and networking virtualization to dedicated hardware and software, allowing nearly all server resources to be allocated to instances. This architecture comprises several key components: Nitro Cards, which offload and accelerate I/O for functions like VPC, EBS, and instance storage; the Nitro Security Chip, providing a minimized attack surface and prohibiting administrative access to eliminate human error and tampering; and the Nitro Hypervisor, a lightweight hypervisor that manages memory and CPU allocation, delivering performance nearly indistinguishable from bare metal. The Nitro System's modular design allows for rapid delivery of EC2 instance types.