(followed by tea/coffee and then informal gatherings at local venues)

ROOM: TBA

ABSTRACT
Public compute clouds provide a flexible platform to host applications
as a set of appliances, e.g., web servers or databases. Each appliance
usually contains an OS kernel and userspace processes, within which
applications access resources via APIs such as POSIX.  The flexible
architecture of the cloud comes at a cost: the addition of another
layer in the already complex software stack. This reduces performance and
increases the size of the trusted computing base.

Our new Mirage operating system proposes a radically different way of
building these appliances. Mirage supports the progressive
specialisation of functional language (OCaml) application source code, and
gradually replaces traditional OS components with type-safe libraries. This
ultimately results in “unikernels”: sealed, fixed-purpose images that
run directly on the hypervisor without an intervening guest OS such as
Linux.

Developers no longer need to become sysadmins, expert in the
configuration of all manner of system components, to use cloud resources.
At the same time, they can develop their code using their usual tools,
only making the final push to the cloud once they are satisfied their code
works. As they explicitly link in components that would normally be provided
by the host OS, the resulting unikernels are also highly compact: facilities that
are not used are simply not included in the resulting unikernel. For
example, the self-hosting Mirage web server image is less than a
megabyte in size!

I’ll describe the architecture of Mirage in the talk, show some code
examples, and interesting benchmark results that compare the
performance of our unikernels to traditional applications such as
Apache and BIND.

ONLINE Free Registration