Unikernels are hard to debug? Unikernels cannot be easily administrated or monitored? While unikernels have the potential to revolutionize our infrastructures and take cloud computing into the next era, many worry that unikernels cannot be seamlessly integrated into today’s development and production workflows. At the Unikraft team, we are heavily working on addressing these concerns and changing the status quo. Although unikernels are monolithic bundles of only necessary kernel functions and an application, we follow the concept that everything is a (micro-)library. Users can pick and choose kernel functionality at build time. The same applies for monitoring and debugging: In this talk, we will give an overview of our current debugging and monitoring capabilities, and we will present our vision for how these pieces will enable a cloud-native experience. We will also give a deep dive into our GDB backend implementation with a live demo.
Unikraft is an open source Xen Project incubator under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. We are currently launching a start-up with the mission to provide Unikraft unikernels for production and enterprise use.
Speakers: Simon Kuenzer Marc Rittinghaus