Authors (if Research)
Anil Madhavapeddy, Richard Mortier, Charalampos Rotsos, David Scott, Balraj Singh, Thomas Gazagnaire, Steven Smith, Steven Hand and Jon Crowcroft
ASPLOS 2013
Abstract:
We present unikernels, a new approach to deploying cloud services
via applications written in high-level source code. Unikernels are
single-purpose appliances that are compile-time specialised into
standalone kernels, and sealed against modification when deployed
to a cloud platform. In return they offer significant reduction in
image sizes, improved efficiency and security, and should reduce
operational costs. Our Mirage prototype compiles OCaml code into
unikernels that run on commodity clouds and offer an order of
magnitude reduction in code size without significant performance
penalty. The architecture combines static type-safety with a single
address-space layout that can be made immutable via a hypervisor
extension. Mirage contributes a suite of type-safe protocol libraries,
and our results demonstrate that the hypervisor is a platform that
overcomes the hardware compatibility issues that have made past
library operating systems impractical to deploy in the real-world.