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Technology

Unikraft and unikernels: the promise that returns

Unikernels were promised as the future of cloud deployment back in 2015, then faded into obscurity soon after. Ten years later, Unikraft has reached a stable release and reads like a more mature, more useful take on that same idea. A review of what has changed.

Architecture

Firecracker: microVMs for multi-tenant services

Firecracker is the Rust-based virtual machine monitor AWS uses in Lambda and Fargate: it boots microVMs in under 125 milliseconds with under 5 MB of overhead. Switching from containers pays off when a shared kernel does not give enough isolation, especially for untrusted LLM agent code, and versus gVisor it wins on I/O performance.