From my read, the benefits do not outweigh the costs. If you want light weight microservices, OS level virtualization is the way to go.
From my read, it counters Bryan Cantrill's claim that, "unikernels are undebuggable".
From personal experience I'm also quite certain Bryan Cantrill's claim is spurious in that regard, as I've used both debugging and tracing facilities w/ LING unikernels to assess a number of runtime and clustering issues.
That is how we used to program many 8 and 16 bit applications, and how many keep programming embedded systems nowadays.
So who cares? What else is HN for if not for posting cool hacks and projects and encouraging fellow builders?
Interesting. I'd like to see a return to owning/renting whole machines and running containers on them directly (as several major tech companies do). A lot of the value proposition for the cloud service providers is a multi-host hypervisor that's really easy to get started with (compared to buying vSphere). If it becomes really easy to deploy your own instance of an open-source container scheduler across your own boxes, we can return to cost-competitive commodity boxes instead of overpaying for AWS.
For SMB private clouds, its a no-brainer; I just buy a FreeNAS or TrueNAS box (FreeBSD based) from iXSystems and have them customize the box for extra ram and CPU. You get ZFS, DTrace and a wicked NAS, OS level virtualization with jails and even linux binary support if required. I've done this successfully in production and could not be happier.
Note: I don't work for iXSystems but I do love their products and services.
Same here, especially since the zones that the Joyent containers are built on are really easy to use and provide entire miniature yet full fledged UNIX servers, not to mention it’s all open source and gratis and the community is really competent.
By having a rich runtime (kernel) that exposes the internals to the world, like Mission Control, TraceViewer and the respective debuggers, when the right set of flags/authentication are enabled.
Unikernel are no different from running embedded applications, bare metal.
Unikernels on the other hand, do actually run on vehicles. There are a few embedded runtimes based on the same architecture.
They have debugging support to attach to graphical debugger, probes, JTAGs, and a few other vendor specific tools.
Of course someone trying to sell me Solaris/Illumnos, will have prejudice to anything else.
Inside of a vehicle, not yet; production example, yes.
Back in the day, there was a kernel bug which prevented Solaris 10 installer from booting on systems with a Pentium III processor. The workaround was to boot the kernel with -k, let it crash and drop into kdb, then patch a certain kernel structure and drop out of the debugger, continuing execution. The same mechanism would work in a car or a Boeing 787, which I understand were actually running Solaris as the control & navigation system.