Hypervisor is a piece of software that lets you run multiple operating systems on the same physical hardware, like a virtual machine manager on steroids. It's the magic behind the curtain that powers cloud computing and keeps your development environments from stepping on each other's toes.

How to use it in a sentence

• "I spun up a new hypervisor instance to test my microservices in isolation, because I don't trust Dave's spaghetti code not to bring down the whole dev environment."

• "Our hypervisor is so overloaded, it's like trying to run Crysis on a Raspberry Pi. Time to beg management for more hardware."

If you actually want to learn more...

• Martin Fowler discusses strategies for managing logical environments and reducing vendor lock-in when using hypervisors and cloud platforms in his articles Enterprise Integration Using REST and Don't get locked up into avoiding lock-in.

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