Leveraging Unikernels and Kubernetes to (Transparently) Double Cloud Workload Performance

Thursday, 12 October, 2023 - 09:4510:05

Felipe Huici, Unikraft GmbH

Abstract: 

Large images and memory consumption, slow cold boots and autoscale, and underwhelming performance begs the question: is the way we do cloud deployments, while convenient, broken? In this talk we'll show that leveraging unikernels (specialized virtual machines) via the Linux Foundation's Unikraft project (www.unikraft.org) it is entirely possible to have your cake and eat it too: (1) memory consumption of only a few MBs, boot times in the milliseconds and throughput 50-100% higher than Linux's using unmodified applications; (2) deployment via Kubernetes, either on-premises or on public clouds; (3) all the while while taking advantage of the strong isolation of VMs. We will show how to get started (spoiler: a single command is enough to build and deploy) as well as a short demo.

In all, our hope is that Unikraft is a step towards efficient, cheaper and environmentally-friendly cloud deployments.

Felipe Huici, Unikraft GmbH

Dr. Felipe Huici is CEO and Co-Founder of Unikraft, a start-up dedicated to lightweight and open source virtualization tech. Prior he worked as chief researcher at NEC Laboratories Europe, has published in several top tier conferences such as SOSP, ASPLOS, OSDI, Eurosys, SIGCOMM, NSDI and CoNEXT, and has given talks at Open Source Summit, P99 and QCon, among others. Finally, Felipe is one of the founders and maintainers of the Linux Foundation Unikraft open source project.

BibTeX
@conference {292119,
author = {Felipe Huici},
title = {Leveraging Unikernels and Kubernetes to (Transparently) Double Cloud Workload Performance},
year = {2023},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}

Presentation Video