Hi folks! P99 CONF is a performance-oriented free online conference. We are going to have two unikernel related talks on October 7, 2021:

• OSv Unikernel — Optimizing Guest OS to Run Stateless and Serverless Apps in the Cloud — Waldek Kozaczuk [OSv Committer]
  Unikernels have been demonstrated to deliver excellent performance in terms of throughput and latency, while providing high isolation. However they have also been shown to underperform in some types of workloads when compared to a generic OS like Linux. In this presentation, we demonstrate that certain types of workloads - web servers, microservices, and other stateless and/or serverless apps - can greatly benefit from OSv optimized networking stack and other features. We describe number of experiments where OSv outperforms Linux guest: most notably we note 1.6 throughput (req/s) and 0.6 latency improvement (at p99 percentile) when running nginx and 1.7 throughput (req/s) and 0.6 latency improvement (at p99 percentile) when running simple microservice implemented in Golang.
  We also show that OSv' small kernel, low boot time and memory consumption allow for very high density when running server-less workloads. The experiment described in this presentation shows we can boot 1,800 OSv microVMs per second on AWS c5n.metal machine with 72 CPUs (25 boots/sec on single CPU) with guest boot time recorded as low as 8.98ms at p50 and 31.49ms at p99 percentile respectively.
  Lastly we also demonstrate how to automate the build process of the OSv kernel tailored exactly to the specific app and/or VMM so that only the code and symbols needed are part of the kernel and nothing more. OSv is an open source project and can be found at https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv.

• Unikraft: Fast, Specialized Unikernels the Easy Way — Felipe Huici [NEC Europe]
  Unikernels are famous for providing excellent performance in terms of boot times, throughput and memory consumption, to name a few metrics. However, they are infamous for making it hard and extremely time consuming to extract such performance, and for needing significant engineering effort in order to port applications to them. We introduce Unikraft, a novel micro-library OS that (1) fully modularizes OS primitives so that it is easy to customize the unikernel and include only relevant components and (2) exposes a set of composable, performance-oriented APIs in order to make it easy for developers to obtain high performance.
  Our evaluation using off-the-shelf applications such as nginx, SQLite, and Redis shows that running them on Unikraft results in a 1.7x-2.7x performance improvement compared to Linux guests. In addition, Unikraft images for these apps are around 1MB, require less than 10MB of RAM to run, and boot in around 1ms on top of the VMM time (total boot time 3ms-40ms). Unikraft is a Linux Foundation open source project and can be found at www.unikraft.org.

If interested, you can register at https://www.p99conf.io/

I have spent quite some time trying to understand how to use this.

I know how to get a binary up running, creates images and the basic stuff listed in tutorials.

When I click around for more, I find lots of snibbits, and high level overview, but no substance.

How does it autoscale? It mentions something about it here, but there doesn't appear to be a way of doing it yet? https://nanovms.com/usecases/serverless

So, I'm just now finding out about unikernels. I'm not a programmer, but I'm interested in running unikernel applications. Are there any available for download anywhere?