Unikernels

Chapter 4. Ecosystem Elements

A group of individual unikernel projects is interesting, but if there is no ecosystem developing around them, the advancement of this technology will slow to a crawl. However, that is not the case here. There are, in fact, a number of ecosystem projects supporting the development and use of unikernels. The following are only a handful of the most interesting ecosystem projects.

Jitsu

Jitsu demonstrates the promise of the amazing agility of unikernel-based workloads. Jitsu, which stands for “Just-in-Time Summoning of Unikernels,” is actually a DNS server. But unlike other DNS servers, it responds to the DNS lookup request while simultaneously launching the unikernel that will service that address. Because unikernels can boot in milliseconds, it is possible to wait until someone has need for a service before that service is actually started. In this case, someone asking for the IP address of a service actually generates the service itself. By the time the requester sees the response to their DNS query, Jitsu has created the service that is associated with that IP address.

This ability to generate services as quickly as they are needed is a major game changer in our industry. We will see more of this in “Transient Microservices in the Cloud”.

MiniOS

MiniOS is a unikernel base from the Xen Project. Originally designed to facilitate driver disaggregation (basically, unikernel VMs that contain only a hardware driver for use by the hypervisor), MiniOS ...