Unikernels have been around for quite a while. The recently formed Unikernel Alliance consortium, as a direct result of this devroom (FOSDEM'23), aims to evangelize unikernels to technical, academic and commercial parties. Still, a common issue is one of usability and reaching parity with Linux-based and Docker-based deployment.

We're excited to announce that we are now there. We are now at the point where we can use unikernels as a drop in replacement for containers, improving performance, resource consumption, cost and security.

In this talk we take a tour on Unikraft, an open source unikernel development kit, and its companion tool, KraftKit. We demonstrate how to easily build, package, run and deploy common applications with Unikraft, benefiting from its focus on specialization. With its POSIX compliant interface, Unikraft allows seamless integration of existing Linux applications. KraftKit provides the tooling layer to allow every action to be one command line away: building your preferred application, running it natively or on a remote setup, starting a debug session and many more.

The talk will be practical, filled with demonstrations with different applications running on top of Unikraft and pointing out resources and information for integrating Unikraft and KraftKit into your workflow, be it research, hobbyist / professional or commercial.