Efficient storage support for unikernels as containers

Abstract

Quite recently, the community has adopted the Cloud-native concept, building application workflows based on microservices. The majority of these services are deployed as containers. Unikernels, which package applications within a single-address space library OS, have been proposed as a stronger isolation mechanism. However, due to different storage semantics between them, the state-of-the-art approaches for using unikernels in place of containers result in decreased performance, inefficient resource utilization and limited functionality. In this work we bridge the storage gap by designing a framework, which extends the Docker storage layer to support unikernel requirements. We show that our framework improves boot time while reducing storage space requirements.