LISA18

Unikernels are still terrible to develop and maintain. Applications have to be ported manually to non-standard OSes before gaining from impressive benefits, like superb performance, great isolation, and a small trusted compute. Unikernels can be instantiated in tens of milliseconds or less. They are tiny with low memory footprints of a few MBs or even KBs. They can achieve high network throughput of 10-40 Gb/s with a single CPU core and they enable running thousands of concurrent instances.


We are going to present the Xen/Linux Foundation's open source Unikraft project. Its high level goal is to provide an automated tool to build unikernels without requiring the time-consuming, expert work as today. In addition, Unikraft targets support for multiple "platforms": Xen, KVM, containers and bare-metal. Images are automatically produced for multiple of these platforms without requiring any additional time from users.