I wanted to make a simple REST service for queuing file uploads, deployable as a virtual machine. The traditional way to do this is to download a Linux cloud image, install the software inside it, and deploy that. Instead I decided to try a unikernel.
Unikernels promise some interesting benefits. The Ubuntu 14.04 amd64-disk1.img cloud image is 243 MB unconfigured, while the unikernel ended up at just 5.2 MB (running the queue service). Ubuntu runs a large amount of C code in security-critical places, while the unikernel is almost entirely type-safe OCaml. And besides, trying new things is fun.
Read more at Thomas Leonard’s Blog.
