I enjoyed this Datanauts podcast, “Unikernels Vs. Containers,” which dove into what unikernels are and why they matter. The interview guest, Adam Wick, really had a depth of knowledge from real working experience researching and using unikernel technology. He basically had the most concise explanation of unikernels I’ve heard yet. To paraphrase:
- Build your application for a kernel
- Turn the kernel into a library
- Combine your application and the library
- Throw away the stuff you don’t need in the library
- Congratulations! You’ve got a unikernel!
- Now just launch it on a hypervisor or even bare metal. It should be relatively secure and resource constrained.
I need to listen to that episode again as I was distractedly tuning out for certain segments. Sounded like there was some good discussion of when unikernels are actually a good use case fit.
Also, from examining the archives, the Datanauts Podcast looks right up my alley.