It's not even new. It has a 40-year history and unikernel-like systems were a major research topic during in the late 80s and early 90s -- except everyone was d

It's not even new. It has a 40-year history and unikernel-like systems were a major research topic during in the late 80s and early 90s -- except everyone was dreaming that we'd have thousands of tiny machines to run it on, rather than big machines with virtualization. "Not enough machines" and "network gets slow before we even get to enough machines" were the two main bottlenecks. Virtualization solves them to some degree. What doesn't help nowadays is the marketing hype that tries to oversell everything and the insane complexity involved in sustaining the whole thing, since virtualization on x86_64 is still, to a high degree, an afterthough that was grumpily patched on x86 along with everything else. The PR bullshit makes serious people outside the high-availability & distributed field discard this as fancy fluff, and the baroque technology stack makes the development pace rather slow.