Unikernels

With the continued rise to domination of the container model led by Docker adoption, we think it's worth calling attention to the continued rapid development in the Unikernel space. Unikernels are single-purpose library operating systems that can be compiled down from high-level languages to run directly on the hypervisors used by commodity cloud platforms. They promise a number of advantages over containers, not least their superfast startup time and very small attack surface area. Many are still at the research-project phase—Drawbridge from Microsoft Research, MirageOS and HaLVM amongst others—but we think the ideas are very interesting and combine nicely with the technique of serverless architecture.