Open Source Summit + ELC Europe 2018

Unikernels have produced impressive performance, including fast instantiation times, tiny memory footprints, and high consolidation, plus potentially a reduced attack surface and easier certification. Their main drawback is that they require applications to be manually ported to the underlying minimal OS; this means both expert work and considerable amount of time.

In this talk we present Unikraft, an incubator project under the auspices of the Xen Project and the Linux Foundation aimed at automating the process of building customized images tailored to specific applications and thus significantly reducing development time. Unikraft decomposes the OS into elementary pieces (e.g., schedulers, memory allocators, drivers, etc.) that users can pick and choose from. It then builds images tailored to the needs of specific applications as well as the target platform (e.g., KVM, Xen) and architecture (e.g., ARM or x86).