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I've been expecting the unikernel approach to catch on more too - although not the "no OS" it can be pretty stripped down compared to a regular OS. Now that un
by OrvalWintermute 5y ago
I've been expecting the unikernel approach to catch on more too - although not the "no OS" it can be pretty stripped down compared to a regular OS. Now that unikernels are starting to gain more traction in the DOD I expect this will continue.
- perbu 5y agoI've worked with Unikernels for a couple of years. They are great, but they are very, very pure and this can be limiting. Say I have an web API written in Go. For some reason I need to do some openssl stuff before I start up my main program. In a container I can just wrap my program in a little shell script which generates/signs a cert before starting the API. Such a simple task. It is gonna be a lot harder with a Go Unikernel as I could have to bake this functionality into the application itself. This Swiss Army knife that is Unix often has it's uses.
- pjmlp 5y agoYou can have best of both worlds with container OSes like Bottlerocket. In any case, in you have a web API written in Java then you can connect advanced monitoring tools like JDK Flight Recorder and directly affect the system via JMX beans. So it is more a matter of tooling maturity than anything else.
- marcus_holmes 5y agoI get that, but I rarely need to do stuff like this - I generally use the awesome ACME library to handle certs. But yes, if I did need to do that then a Unikernel wouldn't be useful. But the reduction in attack surface of not having all those Swiss Army blades hanging about - and not having to configure them just right so I don't accidentally damage stuff - is a real benefit.
- pjmlp 5y agoSomehow I would state that serverless and PaaS for managed languages are where unikernels are going. In those cases 99% of the time you really don't care what runs underneath the language runtime.