I recently worked on a proposal that heavily incorporated the notion of unikernels. Even still, I’m not really sure I could have explained what they were to even someone else technically proficient.
Enter the Google Cloud Platform Podcast. Listening to Pivotal’s John Feminella I finally heard a clear, clean explanation. Check it out for yourself, but the notion of an automatically constructed, application specific, machine image that can run on a hypervisor nails it for me.
They’re still extremely bleeding edge, but it looks like unikernel based approaches will have a place in the microservices oriented future.
P.S. I just started listening to the GCP Podcast, but I’m encouraged by how informative these first couple of episodes have been.