Alexander Jung

Unikernels are bespoke, single-address space, lightweight Virtual Machines which do one thing and one thing only: fully facilitate the runtime of one application. Unikernels represent a compile-time specialization strategy and leverage the joining of user and kernel space via a library Operating System in order to achieve this, offering as a result incredible runtime performance whilst increasing application security via isolated hardware virtualization. As Unikraft, an open-source unikernel SDK and library Opeating System toolkit, has grown over the last few years, the number of available off-the-shelf applications, interpreted languages, libraries, target hypervisors and architectures has grown significantly. In order to ensure consistency between builds, prevent bugs and performance regression, and to allow for new features, a massive effort has been undertaken to facilitate massive build permutations of specialized unikernels which target and include variations of this growing ecosystem based on new commits and Github Pull Requests. In this talk, we discuss the journey of this undertaking, highlight and demo several CI/CD solutions in this space with Concourse, and how we are continuing to expand the ecosystem to automatically and intelligently build unique additional performance-oriented permutations from configurations available in the underlying libOS.

In this talk we give an update on the Unikraft Linux Foundation open source project, a fully modular and librarized unikernel that aims to provide outstanding performance while making it easy to port off-the-shelf applications into unikernels. In particular, we will go into details how Unikraft (1) fully modularizes OS primitives so that it is easy to customize the unikernel and include only relevant components, (2) exposes a set of composable, performance-oriented APIs in order to make it easy for developers to obtain high performance and (3) aims for POSIX compatibility, already supporting over 130+ syscalls. In addition, there are ongoing efforts to integrate Unikraft into popular frameworks such as Kubernetes and Prometheus in order to finally bring the promise of unikernels to the mainstream. Our recent evaluation using off-the-shelf popular applications such as Nginx, SQLite, and Redis shows that running such applications on Unikraft results in a 30%-50% performance improvement compared to Linux guests. Unikraft images for these apps are around 1MB, require less than 10MB of RAM to run, and boot in around 1ms on top of the VMM time (total boot time 2ms-70ms). During the talk we will show a brief demo. Unikraft is Xen Project incubator project.