Unleashing the Power of Unikernels with Unikraft - Florian Schmidt, NEC Laboratories Europe GmbH

Unleashing the Power of Unikernels with Unikraft - Florian Schmidt, NEC Laboratories Europe GmbH

By leveraging specialization and the use of minimalistic OSes, unikernels are able to yield impressive numbers, including fast instantiation times (tens of milliseconds or less), tiny memory footprints (a few MBs or even KBs), and high consolidation (e.g., being able to run many instances on a single device), not to mention a reduced attack surface and easier certification.

The fundamental drawback of unikernels is that they require that applications be manually ported to the underlying minimalistic OS; this requires both expert work and often considerable amount of time.

To address this, we present Unikraft, a Xen sub-project aimed at automating the process of building customized unikernels tailored
to specific applications and thus significantly reducing development
time. We will provide a detailed explanation of the system as well as a demonstration of it.

About Florian Schmidt
Florian Schmidt is a Research Scientist at NEC Laboratories Europe. He holds a master degree and a PhD in computer science from RWTH Aachen, Germany. In the past, he has worked on networked and operating systems, as well as wireless communications. Currently, he is investigating lightweight virtual machines and unikernels, with a focus on the Xen hypervisor. He is one of the maintainers of the unikraft project.