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Comment by dastx | Hacker News Reader

It'll be interesting to write a container system using this and build an orchestrated with this in mind. Would give you a truly minimal container OS.

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“Container” and “OS” don’t mean anything in the context of unikernels. Unikernels are applications with everything they need to run (on bare metal or a hypervisor) baked into the application. So there is no OS to speak of, and the “orchestrator” is probably something like AWS EC2.

OP likely meant service orchestration

I think that’s what I meant as well, but I’m not sure what you mean by “service orchestration”. If Kubernetes is an example of a service orchestrator, then I think something like EC2 would be the unikernel analog.

There is no need for containers in this architecture.

Using includeOS with an application would require installation as an OS, whether on a VM or bare metal. Either way, it would take up many resources. This would be great if the application is a resource heavy app and thus would mostly utilise most/all resources. But for most apps this isn't the case. Hence they're better to be in containers so that multiple applications can be run.

I'm thinking as an alternative to CoreOS or COS. These OSs will likely have a relatively high overhead in comparison to IncludeOS should such an OS exists.

I don't quite understand. certainly if you install it on bare metal there isn't any sharing..but I assume with a virtual machine you can multiplex a large number of instances to share the resources of the underlying machine?

Yes, that is indeed how it has been used the most right now

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