Unikernels

Chapter 1. Unikernels: A New Technology to Combat Current Problems

At the writing of this report, unikernels are the new kid on the cloud block. Unikernels promise small, secure, fast workloads, and people are beginning to see that this new technology could help launch a new phase in cloud computing.

To put it simply, unikernels apply the established techniques of embedded programming to the datacenter. Currently, we deploy applications using beefy general-purpose operating systems that consume substantial resources and provide a sizable attack surface. Unikernels eliminate nearly all the bulk, drastically reducing both the resource footprint and the attack surface. This could change the face of the cloud forever, as you will soon see.

What Are Unikernels?

For a functional definition of a unikernel, let’s turn to the burgeoning hub of the unikernel community, Unikernel.org, which defines it as follows:

Unikernels are specialised, single-address-space machine images constructed by using library operating systems.

In other words, unikernels are small, fast, secure virtual machines that lack operating systems.

I could go on to focus on the architecture of unikernels, but that would beg the key question: why? Why are unikernels really needed? Why can’t we simply live with our traditional workloads intact? The status quo for workload construction has remained the same for years; why change it now?

Let’s take a good, hard look at the current problem. Once we have done that, the advantages ...