Unikernels: Operating Systems as Application Libraries

Speaker/Bio

Scott Weiss, 28, M.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Boston University. Graduated Spring 2015, and began working at EMC shortly after in the newly-formed Cloud Management Division, based in Cambridge MA. My work this past year has been focused on a variety of cloud technologies, including infrastructure services (AWS, Google Cloud), orchestration platforms such as Mesos and Kubernetes, and container runtimes (notably Docker). I also develop games as a hobby in my free time. My favorite language is Golang, which I use for most of my work.

Abstract

Unikernels are lightweight machine images constructed from modular OS components selected to run specific applications. A unikernel combines a customized operating system stack with an application into a single application binary, which runs as a single process, using a single memory address space. This talk will discuss some tradeoffs of running applications as unikernels as opposed to [Unix/Linux/BSD/Windows/etc.]-executable binaries. The talk will end with a demo of a project called UniK, an open-source CLI tool for automating building of unikernels.