Open Source Summit North America 2017

Unikernels represent an extreme approach to application specialisation, and have typically been associated with virtual machines running on hypervisors. However, the technology is much more widely useful, can run on different targets, and has steadily made its way into other projects and products.

In this talk we'll review the progress in the unikernel ecosystem and highlight the advances of the most active open-source projects:
- MirageOS, which has improved the dev experience and supports new cloud targets.
- HaLVM, which created a product to help detect network intrusions.
- IncludeOS, which has made rapid progress and introduced POSIX compatibility.

We'll also discuss how the underlying ideas behind unikernels, of minimalism, composability, and security, have found their way into other projects and products, and the questions this poses for building maintainable systems.