Unikraft is a fast, secure and open-source Unikernel Development Kit. Started as a research project under the Xen Foundation, Unikraft is now reaching technical (and commercial) maturity, being able to run a large set of applications with all the advantages typical to a unikernel: fast booting, low memory footprint, virtual machine isolation.

During the past years, Unikraft, backed by the newly-created Unikraft.io company, has made inroads towards a commercially viable solution for lightweight deployments on the cloud. This is now available in the KraftCloud platform (https://kraft.cloud/), a cost effective platform providing scale to zero, autoscaling and a rich ecosystem of applications.

This has been achieved by focusing on one of the core principles of Unikraft’s design: POSIX-compliance. Unikraft provides a system call layer that emulates the Linux one. This enables the seamless integration of Linux apps and software commonly used in cloud native deployments: languages and frameworks, web servers and proxies, databases with many others continuously being added to the Unikraft application catalog and registry.

In this talk we will present how Unikraft is able to provide a POSIX compliant layer, how applications make use of the binary-compatibility mode to quickly get Linux ELF binaries to run with Unikraft and how we can deploy them as apps either locally or as cloud native apps on the KraftCloud platform. This will be a demo-rich talk, with quite some time being spent in Dockerfiles, the command line and toying with the Unikraft application ecosystem.