Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)
While I respect the job that libvirt does (it works — high praise for software), it’s unfortunate that it is also the answer to the question “how can I represent all these virtualized things using XML?”, which was in fashion when libvirt was created.It’s also a bit misleading to characterize cloud providers as building on libvirt. Libvirt is useful as an mostly hypervisor-agnostic wrapper, which is super useful for enterprise on-prem software, but kinda of the opposite of what big providers need and build for themselves.I wonder what we will look back on as the XML of today. Everything is schemaless JSON and YAML; surely we’ll look back and wonder WTF everyone was thinking? But alas, it’s probably not a data format at all. Only time will tell.