Building the Superfluid Cloud with Unikernels

The confluence of a number of relatively recent trends including the development of virtualization technologies, the deployment of micro datacenters at PoPs, and the availability of microservers, opens up the possibility of evolving the cloud, and the network it is connected to, towards a superfluid cloud: a model where parties other than infrastructure owners can quickly deploy and migrate virtualized services throughout the network (in the core, at aggregation points and at the edge), enabling a number of novel use cases including virtualized CPEs and on-the-fly services, among others. Towards this goal, we identify a number of required mechanisms and present early evaluation results of their implementation. On an inexpensive commodity server, we are able to concurrently run up to 10,000 specialized virtual machines (based on unikernels), instantiate a VM in as little as 10 milliseconds, and migrate it in under 100 milliseconds.