Can anyone comment on the state of these "microVMs" they speak of? I didn't realize Openstack went that deep in the sense that I thought it was just a VM management platform.
The "micoVMs" are Linux containers [1] running within the operating system that is installed on the bare metal.
Since containers start in milliseconds, you gain a tremendous amount of flexibility in what you run on top of these machines. I believe that Pantheon has successfully run ~30k containers (edit: systemd-nspawn, not Docker) on a single machine.
I thought they wouldn't want to muddle the waters by saying "microvm" instead of just using the term container. I thought they were using something like Mirage:
I wouldn't be shocked to see "MicroVM" become the buzzword for "container". Sounds much nicer for putting in marketing material and pitching to non-technical management. That's especially true given that management has been hearing their tech staff talk about VMs for so long.
Disclaimer: I work on the OnMetal team at Rackspace.