Jitsu: just-in-time summoning of unikernels
Anil Madhavapeddy, Thomas M. Leonard, Magnus Skjegstad, Thomas Gazagnaire, David Sheets, Dave Scott, Richard Mortier, Amir M. Chaudhry, Balraj Singh, Jon Ludlam, Jon Crowcroft, Ian Leslie · 2015
Abstract. Network latency is a problem for all cloud services. It can be mitigated by moving computation out of remote datacenters by rapidly instantiating local ser-vices near the user. This requires an embedded cloud platform on which to deploy multiple applications se-curely and quickly. We present Jitsu, a new Xen tool-stack that satisfies the demands of secure multi-tenant isolation on resource-constrained embedded ARM de-vices. It does this by using unikernels: lightweight, compact, single address space, memory-safe virtual ma-chines (VMs) written in a high-level language. Using fast shared memory channels, Jitsu provides a directory service that launches unikernels in response to network traffic and masks boot latency. Our evaluation shows Jitsu to be a power-efficient and responsive platform for hosting cloud services in the edge network while preserv-ing the strong isolation guarantees of a type-1 hypervisor. 1