Want more unikernels?
Gaulthier Gain, Cyril Soldani, Felipe Huici, Laurent Mathy · 2022
Unikernels are on the rise in the cloud. These lightweight virtual machines (VMs) specialized to a single application offer the same level of isolation as full-blown VMs, while providing performance superior to standard Linux-based VMs or even to containers. However, their inherent specialization renders memory deduplication ineffective, causing unikernels, in practice, to consume more memory than their small memory footprint would suggest. This makes them less advantageous when thousands of SaaS and/or FaaS unikernels instances have to run on the same server.