Open Source Summit North America 2022

The cloud is undoubtedly a major success story, but while wildly popular, most deployed services/VMs are extremely bloated and inefficient, resulting in unnecessarily large cloud infrastructure bills and carbon footprint. Unikernels would seem to be a perfect fit for this environment: specialized VMs containing only the functionality needed by each application and resulting in boot times of only milliseconds, memory consumption of a few MBs, high throughput, and a minimal trusted computing base (TCB) to name some of their key characteristics. However, despite being around for several years and being popular in research and developer circles, unikernels have struggled to see major deployment. The reasons are several, including lack of application support, no integration with major orchestration frameworks, poor debugging functionality and documentation and in some cases lacklustre performance. The Linux Foundation Unikraft project has the explicit aim of bringing unikernels into the mainstream. In this talk we will briefly cover the project's history and architecture, and will show how Unikraft is able to provide high performance and security, all of the while making it easy for users to run unmodified mainstream applications. We will also show a brief demo.