Unikernel Whitepapers

The new world of Unikernels is still changing. We will add whitepapers here as they become available.

• The Next Generation Cloud: Rise of the Unikernel by Sarah Conway

Traditional operating systems run multiple applications on a single machine, managing resources and isolating applications from one another. A unikernel runs a single application on a single virtual machine, relying instead on the hypervisor to isolate those virtual machines. Unikernels are constructed by using “library operating systems,” from which the developer selects only the minimal set of services required for an application to run. These sealed, fixed-purpose images run directly on a hypervisor without an intervening guest OS such as Linux.