The security and tooling worries around unikernels are vastly exaggerated, asserted Idit Levine, creator of the Unik, a unikernel compilation tool, as well as a cloud chief technology officer at Dell EMC.
A relatively new concept, Unikernels could be thought of as stripped-down containers with only the functionality needed to run the specific workload at hand. They could offer gains in saved storage and faster performance, but they are anything but a proven technology.
A few months back, a then-EMC colleague of Levine’s charged that unikernels are fundamentally unsecurable as they provided the deepest, “Ring 0” access to an operating system. And a few months prior to that, the chief technology officer of Joyent was also quick to point out another problem of unikernels: lack of tooling.
In this latest edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Levine concisely answers both of these criticisms, as well as discusses the first possible use case for unikernels, namely to power edge devices on the Internet of Things. The interview was conducted by TNS founder Alex Williams and managing editor Joab Jackson at Cloud Foundry Summit Frankfurt.
The post Debunking Unikernel Criticisms appeared first on The New Stack.
