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A comment on After Docker: Unikernels and Immutable Infrastructure. Parent comment

Re:After Docker: Unikernels and Immutable Infrastructure by m0th87 on Friday November 14, 2014 @04:32PM (#8609620)
AWS, Rackspace et al. use hypervisors already, so we're trending toward 4 layers:

  hypervisor -> monolithic kernel -> containers -> application
Unikernels collapse it to:

  hypervisor -> unikernel/application
It's certainly more elegant, although I'm skeptical of the purported performance gains as well, simply because so many optimizations have been thrown into traditional kernels.
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Re:After Docker: Unikernels and Immutable Infrastructure by jdf on Friday November 14, 2014 @07:40PM (#8610407)
If you are using a more minimal hypervisor (see my other comment on the parent), then there do seem to be some measurable gains. I've seen a few papers in this style:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi14/technical-sessions/...

We describe the hardware and software changes needed to take advantage of this new abstraction, and we illustrate its power by showing improvements of 2-5 in latency and 9 in throughput for a popular persistent NoSQL store relative to a well-tuned Linux implementation.

That said, a simple application like memcached might be currently latency-bound by the kernel's network stack, but a more complex application that reads from disk (even SSD) won't be.

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