Live migration technology, like vMotion, has been widely used and been playing an important role in private cloud deployments for years. However, application of this technology remains challenging in the public cloud environment. Here in Alibaba Cloud, we have been working on enabling this powerful system maintenance tool for some periods, like load balance, fault handling, hardware maintenance. In this presentation, we’d like to share how live migration is used in Alibaba Cloud for millions of VMs, the challenges we encountered and how we address them. These challenges include: reduce the downtime below certain threshold, improve the reliability of migration，and backward compatibility between different physical machines. Also, some real application scenarios and data will be presented to show how this technology is being used and becomes more and more important in the Alibaba Cloud.
