Containers vs Hypervisors: The Battle Has Just Begun (Linux.com)

Russell Pavlicek looks at the rivalry between containers and hypervisors over at Linux.com. He outlines the arguments for and against each, and follows it up with a description of a new contender for a "cloud operating system": unikernels. "Unikernel systems create tiny VMs. Mirage OS from the Xen Project incubator, for example, has created several network devices that run kilobytes in size (yes, that's “kilobytes” – when was the last time you heard of any VM under a megabyte?). They can get that small because the VM itself does not contain a general-purpose operating system per se, but rather a specially built piece of code that exposes only those operating system functions required by the application. There is no multi-user operating environment, no shell scripts, and no massive library of utilities to take up room – or to subvert in some nefarious exploit. There is just enough code to make the application run, and precious little for a malefactor to leverage. And in unikernels like Mirage OS, all the code that is present is statically type-safe, from the applications stack all the way down to the device drivers themselves. It's not the “end-all be-all” of security, but it is certainly heading in the right direction."

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