Painful cold boots, terrible auto-scale times, minutes-long waits for compute nodes to be up: these are standard headaches that cloud engineers have to deal with, and work-around, on a daily basis. Much of this stems from the fact that cloud infrastructure relies on technology that was never intended to be reactive in millisecond scales, or at least within the round-trip time of a user request.
In this talk, Felipe will show how building an edge platform based on technology *intended* to be fast and reactive can lead to substantial gains in both the efficiency of running the platform and the user experience when using it. First, Felipe will demonstrate how leveraging unikernels built with the Unikraft Linux Foundation project can lead to (cold) boot times of as little as 2 ms. This, coupled with a fast VMM (FireCracker), and the fact that the images consume little memory (a few MBs) means that 10-50K of them can be run on a single, inexpensive server. Even better: fast suspend/resume times mean that instances can be suspended when idle, and then resumed just-in-time, as the next request comes in — all transparent to the user.
Felipe will show extensive benchmarks (cold boot times, latency, throughput, memory consumption, etc.) from such technology to give a taste of what future cloud platforms could (and should) look like. Felipe will wrap up the talk by showing how Unikraft integrates with the wider tooling ecosystem (e.g., Kubernetes).
