Unikraft’s origin comes from the frustration that while the cloud is functional, it is extremely inefficient.

Layers upon layers of abstraction mean that modern cloud stacks force your application to be further and further removed from the actual hardware, and more and more of the resources you pay for to be consumed by the layers between your application and the hardware itself (hypervisor, kernel, user-space, container run-time, language run-time, etc, etc). In fact, many of the so-called “cloud native” technologies running on the cloud predate the cloud.

About seven years ago Unikraft’s founding members embarked on a research journey to fundamentally revisit how the cloud is built, taking a first principles approach: given that hardware-level isolation is key, what’s the thinnest, most efficient possible and secure software layer that an application requires to run?

The research lead to the creation, about 5 years ago, of the Linux Foundation Unikraft project, with the explicit aim to create a truly cloud-native operating system and cloud stack that would remove all of the inefficiencies of current deployments (cold boots, slow autoscale, bloated images, large memory consumption, exploding cloud bills, etc.).

Unikraft leverages unikernel technology, extremely lightweight but strongly isolated virtual machines that are tailored to the needs of each application at build time, before applications are deployed. Unikraft unikernels are able to boot in a few milliseconds, run modern applications with just a few MBs of memory, accelerate I/O throughput, and provide a much smaller Trusted Computing Base, among other benefits. Unikraft is based on three key principles: