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They are great for scale to zero use cases (cloud hosting serverless firecrackers). With KVM rapid booting you want to remove as much overhead as possible, it k
by KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
They are great for scale to zero use cases (cloud hosting serverless firecrackers). With KVM rapid booting you want to remove as much overhead as possible, it keeps things cheap. The ultimate endgame would be to have a cold-start time almost equivalent to a prewarmed in-memory image using current technology. Of course, this is just one contender among many similar tech. If WebAssembly truly takes off, then unikernels would become irrelevant.
- eyberg 3y agoWasm and unikernels are more complimentary than competitive. You could actually run wasm in something like wasmer or wasmtime wrapped inside Nanos wrapped inside Firecracker if you wanted to. I think as you point out where wasm can shine are the function-as-a-service platforms, although the memory safety issues would probably need to be addressed at some point (writing to 0x0, no ro mem, etc.).
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y agoThe thing is Wasm already provides sandboxing, so you don't really need any additional KVM sandboxing, unless your hostile code threat model goes beyond even what typical cloud providers face. The Linux host for most wasm environments is only a single instance, often already running on bare metal, so there is no significant benefit to stripping it down to a unikernel.