The Impact of Virtualization on Your Database

Cloud computing has become a staple in modern infrastructure, enabling the rapid deployment of virtual machines with minimal user awareness of the underlying hardware. This flexibility is further enhanced by the use of containers, which abstract applications from physical infrastructure. However, AWS's introduction of the i3.metal instance type, which provides direct hardware access, contrasts with this trend of increased abstraction. i3.metal, devoid of a hypervisor, allows for more efficient resource utilization, offering significant performance improvements over its virtualized counterpart, i3.16xlarge. The absence of virtualization overhead results in up to 31% faster write rates and significantly lower read latencies. These performance gains, particularly for I/O-intensive applications, make i3.metal an attractive option for running ScyllaDB on AWS, offering enhanced scalability and efficiency by leveraging the direct access to hardware. The study highlights how removing the virtualization layer can optimize resource use, suggesting that i3.metal is well-suited for real-time Big Data workloads.