Sinclair Schuller is the CEO and cofounder of Apprenda, a leader in enterprise Platform as a Service.
Container technologies have received explosive attention in the past year – and rightfully so. Projects like Docker and CoreOS have done a fantastic job at popularizing operating system features that have existed for years by making those features more accessible.
Containers make it easy to package and distribute applications, which has become especially important in cloud-based infrastructure models. Being slimmer than their virtual machine predecessors, containers also offer faster start times and maintain reasonable isolation, ensuring that one application shares infrastructure with another application safely. Containers are also optimized for running many applications on single operating system instances in a safe and compatible way.
So what’s the problem?
Traditional operating systems are monolithic and bulky, even when slimmed down. If you look at the size of a container instance – hundreds of megabytes, if not gigabytes, in size – it becomes obvious there is much more in the instance than just the application being hosted. Having a copy of the OS means that all of that OS’ services and subsystems, whether they are necessary or not, come along for the ride. This massive bulk conflicts with trends in broader cloud market, namely the trend toward microservices, the need for improved security, and the requirement that everything operate as fast as possible.
Containers’ dependence on traditional OSes could be their demise, leading to the rise of unikernels. Rather than needing an OS to host an application, the unikernel approach allows developers to select just the OS services from a set of libraries that their application needs in order to function. Those libraries are then compiled directly into the application, and the result is the unikernel itself.
The unikernel model removes the need for an OS altogether, allowing the application to run directly on a hypervisor or server hardware. It’s a model where there is no software stack at all. Just the app.
There are a number of extremely important advantages for unikernels:
- Size – Unlike virtual machines or containers, a unikernel carries with it only what it needs to run that single application. While containers are smaller than VMs, they’re still sizeable, especially if one doesn’t take care of the underlying OS image. Applications that may have had an 800MB image size could easily come in under 50MB. This means moving application payloads across networks becomes very practical. In an era where clouds charge for data ingress and egress, this could not only save time, but also real money.
- Speed – Unikernels boot fast. Recent implementations have unikernel instances booting in under 20 milliseconds, meaning a unikernel instance can be started inline to a network request and serve the request immediately. MirageOS, a project led by Anil Madhavapeddy, is working on a new tool named Jitsu that allows clouds to quickly spin unikernels up and down.
- Security – A big factor in system security is reducing surface area and complexity, ensuring there aren’t too many ways to attack and compromise the system. Given that unikernels compile only which is necessary into the applications, the surface area is very small. Additionally, unikernels tend to be “immutable,” meaning that once built, the only way to change it is to rebuild it. No patches or untrackable changes.
- Compatibility – Although most unikernel designs have been focused on new applications or code written for specific stacks that are capable of compiling to this model, technology such as Rump Kernels offer the ability to run existing applications as a unikernel. Rump kernels work by componentizing various subsystems and drivers of an OS, and allowing them to be compiled into the app itself.
These four qualities align nicely with the development trend toward microservices, making discrete, portable application instances with breakneck performance a reality. Technologies like Docker and CoreOS have done fantastic work to modernize how we consume infrastructure so microservices can become a reality. However, these services will need to change and evolve to survive the rise of unikernels.
The power and simplicity of unikernels will have a profound impact during the next five years, which at a minimum will complement what we currently call a container, and at a maximum, replace containers altogether. I hope the container industry is ready.
Why unikernels might kill containers in five years originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2015.
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