[cnst]

FreeBSD jail predates Amazon Web Services, and so does SWsoft's Virtuozzo that was subsequently open-sourced as OpenVZ. For Amazon SES, DJB's qmail made it possible to send a ridiculous amount of subscription emails very efficiently, too.

I've been using a VPS powered by Virtuozzo since like 2002 or 2003, how is EC2 all that different? Just the API?

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuozzo_(company), SWsoft was founded in 1997, and publicly released Virtuozzo in 2000.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail, FreeBSD jail was committed into FreeBSD in 1999 "after some period of production use by a hosting provider", and released with FreeBSD 4.0 in 2000.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qmail, qmail was released in 1998.

Today, lots of AWS services are basically just re-packaged OSS packages.

[adastra22]

EC2 services aren't tied to a machine, just a region. The details of what machine to instantiate a VM on, or the details of moving a VM between hosts, attaching remote drives over IP, or handling the networking that makes this all possible, that was worked out by Amazon to host Amazon.com, which they then resold as a service under the banner AWS. The pieces were there, but not a unified "cloud" architecture.

This is smelling like the classic "Dropbox isn't anything new" HN comment.

TODAY amazon services are just re-packaged OSS packages, yes. That wasn't the case before.

[cnst]

OK, so, you're saying migration and remote drives over IP is the secret sauce of AWS / EC2?

Per Wikipedia, live migration was added to OpenVZ in April 2006, one year after OpenVZ was open-sourced in 2005, five years after Virtuozzo was first released as a commercial product in 2000, 3 years after the company was started in 1997. Straight from Wikipedia. I would guess that prior to April 2006, live migration was already available as part of commercial Virtuozzo for quite a while, probably.

Not to mention Xen. Isn't it common knowledge that EC2 was powered first by Xen, then by Linux-KVM, switching in 2017? What exactly is their secret sauce, except for stealing OSS and not giving back?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuozzo_(company)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVZ#Checkpointing_and_live_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/aws_writes_new_kvm_...

---

Dropbox is a little different, but, even then, doesn't everyone simply use Google Drive today? What's so special about Dropbox in 2025?

Just look at Virtuozzo. Why did SWsoft/Parallels open-source it into OpenVZ? The decision makes no sense, wasn't Virtuozzo their whole product they were selling to the hosting providers?

The answer lies in the complexities of the kernel code. By open-sourcing the underlying technology, they're ensuring immediate compatibility with all upcoming kernel changes. Had they kept it in-house, it'd be a nightmare to continue to integrate it with each upcoming Linux release, riddling the technology with preventable bugs, and eventually losing to competitors, including Xen and Linux-KVM at the time. OpenVZ was extremely popular in the VPS community until just a few years ago, before we had more RAM than we known what to do with, before Linux-KVM replaced both Xen and OpenVZ in the majority of the hosting environments in the last 10 years as of 2025.

I do agree with the other commenter that you're just rewriting the history here. All of these EC2 clouds are simply repackaged OSS (Xen and then Linux-KVM in the case of AWS EC2). If Amazon had actually developed some truly unique kernel stuff, we'd see it OSS by now, because of the difficulty with maintaining those kinds of kernel forks locally. But we don't. Because they haven't.

[adastra22]

You are failing to understand that the product is not the technology. The product is the interface. One of the products you listed had the “cloud” interface we are familiar with today.

[darkwater]

The product AWS invented was selling it as a service to 3rd parties over the Internet. And that's it.

[supriyo-biswas]

This is such a blatant rewrite of history; as an example live migrations were a thing in Xen: https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_....

[whstl]

Quoting myself from another post:

A lot of people in this industry have near-zero operations knowledge that doesn't involve AWS, and it's frightening.

They also have near-zero knowledge on the history of the field.

[adastra22]

I didn’t realize Xen migrations were made available from a uniform web API accessible from remote tools and fully abstracted/automated at the cluster level.

You are focused on the details and missing entirely the point of my post.

[cnst]

What do you think was the purpose of FreeBSD jail, Virtuozzo and Xen?

https://web.archive.org/web/20011204195446/http://www.sw-sof...

https://web.archive.org/web/20011224040032/http://www.sw-sof...

That's 2001, and Virtuozzo was already advertised supporting migrations.

OpenVZ remained super popular for at least like 10 years after it was open-sourced as OpenVZ in 2005, well into 2015, at least. Primarily because it allowed over-provisioning of RAM and all the other resources, which wasn't possible in other environments without the memory balloon drivers and other issues.

I imagine the major reason OpenVZ has declined in popularity is because nowadays memory is cheap enough that over-provisioning of RAM isn't that much of a selling point, and not being able to run your own kernel with processor-guaranteed virtualisation, is deemed too old-fashioned and less secure for true multitenancy than Linux-KVM, which has basically taken over the entire market, from both Xen and OpenVZ, and VMware, and everybody else. Even Amazon EC2 is based on Linux-KVM now, whereas previously it was based on Xen.