Unikraft at Usenix Lisa 21 Conference: It's Time to Debloat the Cloud with Unikraft

On Thursday, June 3 at 12 pm PT, check out Unikraft’s talk at Usenix Lisa 21. Felipe Huici, NEC Laboratories Europe GmbH, will be giving the following talk, “It’s Time to Debloat the Cloud with Unikraft.

In his presentation, Felipe will outline the real challenges of cloud computing today and how, despite the hype of “spinning up” new cloud servers, 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. 

The audience will hear about Unikraft’s ability to seamlessly generate extremely efficient yet high-performing, cloud-ready images that are each tailored to the needs of specific applications. Felipe will outline major performance gains seen by using Unikraft. For example, how running off-the-shelf applications such as nginx, SQLite, and Redis on Unikraft results in a 1.7x-2.7x performance improvement compared to Linux guests. 

Unikraft is a sub-project of the Xen Project, a hosted project at the  Linux Foundation, and can be found at www.unikraft.org.

About the Speaker

Felipe is a chief researcher at NEC Laboratories Europe in Heidelberg, Germany. His main research and interests lie in the areas of high-performance software systems, and particular specialization, virtualization and security. He has been published in several top-tier conferences and journals such as SOSP, Eurosys, SIGCOMM, NSDI, CoNEXT, and SIGCOMM CCR and regularly act as TPC member of conferences and journals such as IMC, INFOCOM, CoNEXT and SIGCOMM CCR.

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