In the public cloud (aws/gce) we provision unikernels as vms themselves - that is there is no underlying linux instance. It's just the unikernel riding on top o

In the public cloud (aws/gce) we provision unikernels as vms themselves - that is there is no underlying linux instance. It's just the unikernel riding on top of the hypervisor (in the case of google that's kvm, for the t2s on aws it's xen but their c5s are kvm). For small services you use t2-micros (aws) and f1-micros (gce). Both will give you a thread. If you need more you scale more. This works great if you have a handful of services - if you have hundreds or thousands of services yes you might want to look at running on your own hardware as the public cloud could get expensive at that point or conversely you can re-evaluate if you need hundreds of services and maybe just opt for larger services that use heftier amounts of threads/memory (eg: larger instance sizes). As for running your own hardware we have crappy (eg: $800) servers in our office that have 32 threads and we haven't really stressed it at all but we can easily run thousands of unikernels on those boxes. Also, in the bay area you can grab a cabinet from Hurricane Electric for $400/month. Imagine what you could do with real hardware.