I spend most of my time working on Project Atomic to further Linux containers deriving from a traditional upstream Linux distribution model, but the space of software delivery/runtime mechanisms is vast, and in particular, I have thought Unikernels were an interesting development.   While I do like writing C, the thought of an OS/library in a high level language is an interesting one (particularly interesting to me for a long time is how garbage collection could be better if integrated with the OS).

That was before Docker, Inc. acquired a unikernel company – now, I’m certainly curious where they’re going to go with it.

My thoughts before this were that the Unikernel model might make sense in the scenario where you have a “large” application and your sole deployment target is required to be virtualized (e.g. AWS, GCE, etc.).

In this case, it’s not really possible to share anything between virtual machines directly (modulo KSM and similar ad-hoc techniques which cost CPU and aren’t always predictable) – and so because you can’t share anything between these apps, it could gain you efficiency to dump the parts of the OS and userspace that you aren’t using in that VM, which could be a lot.

But, if you have any smaller microservice applications, it seems to me that having a shared kernel and userspace (as we provide with the Project Atomic and OpenShift 3 models) is going to be a lot more efficient than doing a VM-per-microservice, even if your VMs are unikernels.

And even with the “large app only for virt” scenario, what about debugging?  Ah yes, I just found a blog from Bryan Cantrill on this topic, and I have to say I agree.

Still though, there’s lots of middle ground here.  We can do far better at helping application authors to produce smaller apps (and host images) than we are with Docker normally right now, for example.