Stop running cloud applications onslow, expensive infrastructure.

Optimize existing cloud workloads by augmentingyour virtualization platform.

The Cloud Paradox

Your infra abstraction is hidingancient pre-cloud tech.

And hyperscalers have no incentive to make real optimizations.At least, none that are available to us.

Wasteful server resource utilization

With Unikraft run 1000s of strongly-isolated VMs on a single server and reduce your carbon footprint.

Slow cold boots, slow auto-scale

With Unikraft, say bye to cold boots, and hello to millisecond autoscale to adapt to your traffic peaks.

Getting charged for inactive instances

With Unikraft everything is scale to zero by default: no wasted resources and no charging for idleness.

Excessive memory consumption

With Unikraft 90% of your memory usage goes to your application, not the cloud stack underneath.

Over-bloated images

With Unikraft, build images whose size is only as big as the application you're building. MBs, not GBs.

Inefficient IO throughput

With Unikraft, shortcut the path between your app and the hardware, and boost your I/O by up to 200%

“While cloud clearly delivers on its promise early on in a company’s journey, the pressure it puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits, as a company scales and growth slow.”

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Sarah Wang and Martin Casado
Andreessen Horowitz

The “modern” cloud stack has become an archeological site, with layers of software, libraries, runtimes and kernel making it impossible for your application to be truly resource efficient.

Abstractions and layers are good, right?

Not really. The modern cloud stack has accreted many layers over time, with the end result that a significant portion of resources go to the stack itself and NOT your app.

The unit of isolation still is the VM

And for good reason. Only a hypervisor provides hardware-level isolation, so it’s unsurprising that this is the bedrock of all major cloud providers. If you’re running on the cloud (even as a container), you’re running on a VM.

Your app directly on top of the hypervisor

With Unikraft, run your app with the thinnest possible layer between it and the hypervisor so most resources go to it.

YOUR APPVMMCONTAINER RUNTIMEGUEST OS + KERNELGUESTPROCESSESSIDECARSNETWORK EMULATIONHOST OS + KERNELIAAS ORCHESTRATIONHOSTPROCESSESANOTHER RUNTIMEHYPERVISORHARDWARE...Keep digging...

A new era of cloud

Unikraft helps your team deliver significantly better on performance KPIs while reducing cloud costs.

Automatically accelerate your cloud app as an extremely efficient, green, and highly secure image with your existing tools and pipelines -- and zero disruption.

Amazon Linux 2 EC2 AMI + NGINX

t3.nano eu-central-1a

1715 ms

AL2 Boot Time

Init unecessary services

7810 ms

NGINX Boot Time

Lost clients & revenue

355.4 MB

Active Memory Usage

More than just NGINX

2692.2 MB

Disk Image Size

Hoarding diskspace

Unikraft + NGINX on KraftCloud

1 vCPU, 64 MiB RAM fra0

6 ms
Decreased by -99%

Unikraft Boot Time

Fast system initialization

7 ms
Decreased by -99%

NGINX Boot Time

Ready to serve requests

4.4 MB
Decreased by -96%

Active Memory Usage

Just NGINX running

1.9 MB
Decreased by -99%

Disk Image Size

Fast to provision

“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... @libsqlhq server running with kraft.cloud and cold booting in 30 milliseconds 🤯💎🚀”

Pekka Enberg
Pekka Enberg
CTO at Turso

“Imagine running thousands of pods on K8s with just your app code and required libraries, like Alpine images on steroids.”

Ali Khajeh-Hosseini
Ali Khajeh-Hosseini
Co-Founder at Infracost

“You guys are doing cloud rocket science.”

Dmitry Kolesnikov
Dmitry Kolesnikov
Senior Principal Engineer at Zalando

“My favorite unikernel framework.”

Jonathan Beri
Jonathan Beri
CEO at Golioth

“It is a gorgeous way to build lightweight and secure VM images.”

Emad Heydari Beni
Emad Heydari Beni
Researcher at Bell Labs

“I was actually more impressed with unikernels with Unikraft than WASM. (And that is saying a lot if you know how I feel about unikernels).”

Darren Shepherd
Darren Shepherd
Creator of K3s

“This has revolutionised our infrastructure — offering efficiency and scalability at a great price-point. It'll be a game-changer for all devops workflows.”

Ludwig Trotter
Ludwig Trotter
CEO at IfGive.app

Frequently Asked Questions

Dive into the following questions to gain insights into the powerful features that Unikraft offers and how it can elevate your cloud development journey.

What’s Unikraft?

Unikraft GmbH is the company behind the next-generation cloud compute platform based on millisecond semantics, KraftCloud. This is based on the open-source, Linux Foundation Open-Source project Unikraft.

What’s a unikernel?

A unikernel is a specialized OS/kernel designed to provide a lightweight, single-purpose execution environment for applications, without any unnecessary components to minimize resource usage and attack surfaces. Learn more.

Aren’t virtual machines heavyweight?

They need not be! Unikraft unikernels are extremely lightweight and are fully- fledged virtual machines, providing strong, hardware-level isolation. VMs are the workhorse of public cloud deployments, and with Unikraft they provide the lightweight characteristics of containers of process (e.g., millisecond cold boot times).

How much smaller are Unikraft images?

The answer depends on the application of course, but with Unikraft we can confident say that most of an image’s size is due to the application itself. For example, an NGINX Unikraft image is under 2MBs in size. Do Unikraft unikernels come with security benefits? Yes, especially stemming from the fact that they have a minimal Trusted Computing Base (TCB), and everything is off by default (services, ports, etc).

Built around the open-source Unikraft SDK

Adopt the most comprehensive unikernel library Operating System and tooling available.

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GitHub Stars

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Discord Members

Regularly Updated Documentation

Monthly Software Releases