Xen Developer & Design Summit 2018

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.