Cloudius Systems is introducing an early access version of OSv, the lightweight open-source OS optimized for large cloud workloads, on November 13. Beta program information is now available.

OSv can be used to minimize latency and reduce TCO for many workloads, especially horizontally scaled ones. The software is available as ready-to-run virtual machine images pre-configured to run popular NoSQL data stores such as Redis and Apache Cassandra, as well as in source code form.

“OSv lets you take a project from a developer’s IDE to a flexible, multi-server deployment much faster,” said Dor Laor, CEO of Cloudius Systems. “As customers require more and more throughput at lower and lower operating cost, we enable developers to use the agility of containers along with the proven security and management features known for in virtual machines.”

Cloudius Systems’ early access release features an expanded Web API for management, along with performance improvements that increase efficiency, with an up to a 3.9x throughput gain. Unlike conventional operating systems with their diverse configuration files and complex user and memory management, OSv is designed to provide the minimum OS needed to run a single application at maximum performance in the cloud.

“OSv was designed with virtualization in mind,” said Cloudius Systems CTO, Avi Kivity. “The OS overhead is minimized by a reduction of context switches, data copies, and inefficient constructs such as spinlocks.” OSv virtual machines can be as small as 20MB, far smaller than Docker containers, and boot in less than one second.

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You can keep up with the latest OSv news from this blog’s feed, or folllowing @CloudiusSystems on Twitter. Hope to see you at the show.

Photo: Rama for Wikimedia Commons