Speaker:

David Eyers, Department of Computer Science

Title:

Introducing Unikernels, and presenting initial research that uses them to build simple web applications

Location:

Owheo G34 - 1:00 pm, Friday 29 April

Abstract:

Unikernels are specialised operating system builds that only contain the code necessary to allow a single target application to run. Appealing features of unikernels include their small memory footprint, extremely quick startup, and minimal security attack surfaces. The downsides have included the difficulty in constructing and maintaining such library operating systems, and in the likely need for large amounts of clean-slate system reengineering. Significant progress has been made on both of these fronts recently. I will present our initial research into an approach for building web appliances that tries to balance the ease of development of a traditional operating system environment, with the use of unikernels for production deployment.