Unikernels Motivations, Benefits and Issues: A Multivocal Literature Review
summary
Multivocal review analyzes 590 sources, filters 528 out, and synthesizes 62 studies (about 64% peer reviewed, 22% gray literature) to report concrete claims: main motivations are performance and security but benefits confirmed are mainly faster startups and smaller images with lower resource use, while surprises include resource usage higher than Docker and degraded network throughput in some cases. Tooling is immature, many unikernel projects lack multiprocessing, orchestration and stable frameworks such as MirageOS or OSv see limited adoption and mixed results.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Unikernels introduction
- 1:49What are unikernels
- 3:56Unikernels vs VMs and containers
- 4:18Research goals and method
- 6:25Literature review process
- 8:12Unikernel technologies status
- 10:02Reasons for adopting unikernels
- 10:44Reported benefits
- 11:46Unikernel issues and challenges
- 13:52Technical limitations
- 15:38Unexpected findings
- 16:43Future directions
- 17:24Conclusion and recommendations
- 18:05Q&A: Usefulness
- 19:10Q&A: Gray literature
- 19:57Q&A: Distributed use cases
