A Multiserver User-space Unikernel for a Distributed Virtualization System Pablo Pessolani Departamento de Ingeniería en Sistemas de Información Facultad Regional Santa Fe, UTN Santa Fe, Argentina
[email protected] Abstract— Nowadays, most Cloud applications are developed application components began to be deployed in Containers. using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) or MicroService Containers (and similar OS abstractions such as Jails [7] and Architecture (MSA). The scalability and performance of them Zones [8]) are isolated execution environments or domains is achieved by executing multiple instances of its components in in user-space to execute groups of processes. Although different nodes of a virtualization cluster. Initially, they were Containers share the same OS, they provide enough security, deployed in Virtual Machines (VMs) but, they required enough performance and failure isolation. As Containers demand computational, memory, network and storage resources to fewer resources than VMs [9], they are a good choice to hold an Operating System (OS), a set of utilities, libraries, and deploy swarms. the application component. By deploying hundreds of these Another option to reduce resource requirements is to use application components, the resource requirements increase a the application component embedded in a Unikernel [10, lot. To minimize them, usually small OSs with small memory footprint are used. Another way to reduce the resource 11]. A Unikernel is defined as “specialized, single-address- requirements is integrating the application components in a space machine image constructed by using library operating Unikernel. This article proposes a Unikernel called MUK, system” [12]. A Unikernel is a technology which integrates based on a multiserver OS, to be used as a tool to integrate monolithically network, storage, and file systems services Cloud application components.