Operating Systems

Unikraft - Unleashing the Power of Unikernels

Tell me a bit about the work that you're doing today?

We've been working on systems and virtualization for a while and especially virtual machines on the Xen platform. We were very happy with that platform because it gave great isolation. But over time VMs got a reputation about being heavyweight, which was emphasized by the rise of containers, and VMs began to lose ground except for mission critical systems or places where isolation was critical. You now had a trade-off between virtual machines which are heavy weight but provide great isolation and lightweight virtualization with containers but at the cost of security issues.

What do you plan to discuss in the talk itself?

The talk itself is about the actual Unikraft system: how it achieves what it achieves, how it's put together. We will include a very short demo showing how to go through the process of building a unikernel and running it and then probably at the end I'll show what the team is currently doing. Unikraft is an incubation project under the auspices of the Xen Project and the Linux Foundation. We're open to comments, contributions, criticisms, and it's open sourced so if anybody wants to contribute they're more than welcome to.