Lightning Talk: Unikernels Vs Containers Vs VMs
summary
Compares VMs, microVMs and containers against unikernels using boot time, memory footprint and developer experience as axes, citing Firecracker, Hyperlight and QEMU microVMs as examples and Firecracker as polished but brittle; credits OCI and Alpine for smaller container images; cites 2021 and 2025 papers showing unikernels produce much smaller images and faster cold starts but exhibit high performance variability under constrained resources and with AOT vs JIT; notes runc can run unikernels on Kubernetes.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (7)
- 0:00Minimal compute motivation
- 1:06Virtual machines inefficiencies
- 4:17MicroVMs advantages over VMs
- 5:21Containers for edge evolution
- 6:47Unikernels unique approach
- 9:14Unikernels performance challenges
- 10:19Unikernels on Kubernetes
related talks
15mLeveraging Unikernels and Kubernetes to (Transparently)...
25mOne Size Fits None: Lightweight Workload-Specialized Confidential Containers
37mUnik: Unikernel Runtime for Kubernetes
19mBuilding a Cloud Infrastructure to Deploy Microservices as Microvm Guests
37mLet's Try All the CRI Runtimes: Part 2: Answering the Why Question!
45mContainers are dead. Long live virtual machines!
25mDeploying Unikernels in Production with Kubernetes
34mThe beauty of virtual infrastructure with K8s and containers