Because virtualization is everywhere, new challenges in the IT world are revealing that this crucial component has to be improved on a regular basis. This requires a lot of coordination between Open Source projects as well as intense research and development efforts.

NVMe storage performance revealing hidden bottlenecks, Intel CPU flaws changing the security landscape regarding isolation, increasing complexity of stacks requiring more and more components working together, hardware specialization, new protocols, new use cases on top (k8s): these are a few of the challenges that a virtualization platform must answer in 2020.

We'll first see a landscape of these new challenges, then the possible approaches to solve them, and finally a concrete example of what the XCP-ng project is doing to integrate all these changes in a fully Open Source fashion, inside a turnkey Xen distro.