SREcon23 Europe/Middle East/Africa - Leveraging Unikernels and Kubernetes to (Transparently)...

SREcon23 Europe/Middle East/Africa - Leveraging Unikernels and Kubernetes to (Transparently) Double Cloud Workload Performance Felipe Huici, Unikraft GmbH Large images and memory consumption, slow cold boots and autoscale, and underwhelming performance begs the question: is the way we do cloud deployments, while convenient, broken? In this talk we’ll show that leveraging unikernels (specialized virtual machines) via the Linux Foundation’s Unikraft project () it is entirely possible to have your cake and eat it too: (1) memory consumption of only a few MBs, boot times in the milliseconds and throughput 50-100% higher than Linux’s using unmodified applications; (2) deployment via Kubernetes, either on-premises or on public clouds; (3) all the while while taking advantage of the strong isolation of VMs. We will show how to get started (spoiler: a single command is enough to build and deploy) as well as a short demo. In all, our hope is that Unikraft is a step towa