If you're looking for a reason to learn OCaml, Xen recently announced the 1.0 release of the MirageOS unikernel[1]. Basically you write your application in OCam

If you're looking for a reason to learn OCaml, Xen recently announced the 1.0 release of the MirageOS unikernel[1]. Basically you write your application in OCaml and it's compiled directly into the kernel, with the goal of eliminating a lot of the overhead from using a general purpose OS by doing only what your application needs. It's a very cool concept which I think has been a long time coming. The best part is that you can easily run the compiled unikernels on EC2 (and any other cloud provider which allows you to run a custom kernel). http://www.openmirage.org/ http://www.openmirage.org/