VM live migration at scale

Abstract

Uninterrupted uptime is a critical aspect of Virtual Machines (VMs) offered by cloud hosting providers. Google's VMs run on top of rapidly changing infrastructure: we regularly update hardware and host software, and we must quickly respond to failing hardware. Frequent change is critical to both development velocity - -deploying new versions of services and infrastructure - -and the ability to respond rapidly to defects, including critical security fixes. Typically these updates would be disruptive, resulting in VM termination or restart. In this paper we present how we use VM live migration at scale to eliminate this disruption with minimal impact to the guest, performing over 1,000,0001migrations monthly in our production fleet, with 50ms median blackout, 300ms 99th percentile blackout.