Automation, repeatability, reliability and testing are the basis of the ability to move fast in software. Over the years, we lost control and let our software environments turn into overweight pets, and then gradually replicated these into overweight cattle. The new focus on microservices and containers is sweeping this away, and we are focusing on total control over the development process, traceability of artefacts, and security in deployment. The natural outcome of this is that we will end up developers specifying the totality of their application in production, breaking apart the old distinction between the operating system and the application.

Unikernels are these production artifacts, the butterflies of the microservice world, specialised to perform a single function fleetingly. In this talk I look at our build, ship and run pipelines and how the changes we are seeing lead to unikernels in production.