Our needs have changed. Hardware isn't the bottleneck anymore and copying a few dozen megabytes a few thousand times each is trivial. We are now trying to get t

Our needs have changed. Hardware isn't the bottleneck anymore and copying a few dozen megabytes a few thousand times each is trivial. We are now trying to get the most out of humans. Traditionally we've done this by adding layers of abstraction, but this hides complexity and introduces surface area, bringing security and compatibility risks with it. Nowadays there are very few humans who intimately understand more than a fraction of the layers of a modern (read: trendy) tech stack. Unikernels let you combine the top 3 layers of the (Hardware -> Hypervisor -> Kernel -> Userspace -> Application) stack into one. That's a big win for reducing complexity. And if unikernels take off, I expect better tools for managing them to be built right in to hypervisors to help restore whatever functionality gets lost in the squish. Funny thing is, if you squint a little, the resulting (Hardware -> Hypervisor -> Unikernel) stack looks a lot like (Hardware -> Operating System -> Application), which we all know and love from traditional pre-virtualization environments. In a sense, we're not so much rejecting the multi-user model as we are reinventing it for a cloud-based age. Maybe this is indeed a big waste of time, but I don't think so. When it comes to multi-tenant computing, we operate under radically different assumptions than we did 30 years ago.