It's Time to Debloat the Cloud with Unikraft

Cloud computing has revolutionized the way we think about IT infrastructure: Another web server? More database capacity? Resources for your artificial intelligence use case? Just spin-up another instance and you are good to go. That's the hype, but the reality is that the cloud, whether public or private, is severely bloated: instances can run up to GBs in size, "fast" boot times can take in the order of minutes, and memory consumption for running a single simple service (e.g., a static content web server) can be exorbitant. In this talk, we will present the Linux Foundation Unikraft project, a build tool and framework for seamlessly generating extremely efficient yet high performance cloud-ready images that are each tailored to the needs of specific applications. Our evaluation using off-the-shelf applications such as nginx, SQLite, and Redis shows that running them on Unikraft results in a 1.7x-2.7x performance improvement compared to Linux guests. Unikraft is a Linux Foundation open source project and can be found at www.unikraft.org.