The things I hear from the Unikernel crowd sound a lot like the stuff I hear from Docker, although I note that part of where Amir seems to be going is where Docker came from[0]. I personally think that immutability is an important component of building modern distributed systems (things that are in production should be as immutable as possible; we've even experimented with reverting machines to initial state on a rolling basis, for example). If you have stateless services, it makes sense to constantly bring up boxes that are at the initial state as memory leaks or other errors compound over time.

At Terminal we do this by having RAM-perfect snapshots (think VMWare style snapshots, but without a hypervisor) and rolling new instances from an initial state. The snapshotting works by taking the RAM-state, CPU cache and Disk state at a given moment and committing it to Disk for later restoration. Once you have the primitive of being able to treat machine state like a file system, you get a lot of properties that you might not otherwise have access to (like being able to bring up machines with state in the time it takes to read the RAM from disk).

I am overall quite bullish on Unikernels, but I do think there's quite a bit of distance to cover between where we are now and where companies will feel comfortable trusting their infrastructure to MirageOS.

I am particularly interested in running MirageOS without a hypervisor, but I understand why that's not yet possible (please do correct me if I'm wrong). If MirageOS is running in a container somewhere, I'd like to see it.

[0]http://devops.com/blogs/docker-leaving-immutable-infrastruct...