When it comes to the world of technology and computing power, there is very little doubt that there are always new opportunities to improve computing power. As more and more businesses continue to move to the cloud, that improvement will very likely occur on the cloud. One such relatively new technology is known as unikernels. Here you will learn how Unikernels Help Performance Engineering slow software systems.
3 Ways Unikernels Help Performance Engineering for Slow Software Systems
But what are unikernels, and what are some of the ways that they can improve performance for slow software systems? Continue reading to learn the answers to those questions and more!
What they do, how they work
While the technology behind unikernels is brilliantly simple, it can still be quite difficult to explain how they work. Overall, unikernels can be defined as specialized and single-address-space machine images that are constructed through using library operating systems.
They are built by putting together high-level languages directly into specialized machine images. Typically, they are built to run directly on a hypervisor. Because hypervisors power the vast majority of public cloud computing infrastructure (including Amazon EC2), it enables your services to run for a cheaper price and with more security than they would if you were running them on a full software stack.
There’s no doubt that unikernels provide lots of benefits when compared to traditional operating systems. Here are 3 of the top ways that unikernels can help you.
Faster boot times
When it comes to slow-running software systems, unikernels can help speed things up thanks to their ability to boot up incredibly quickly. In fact, unikernels can boot in just a few milliseconds! This is going to allow you to spend much less time wasted waiting for a slow software system to boot up.
Smaller footprints
Unikernel images are often much smaller than the traditional OS deployments. Smaller footprints mean less computing power being spent on accessing unikernels. This allows you to put more of your computing power into programs that need it, ensuring that everything you need to run your business works as well and as smoothly as possible.
Boosted security
One other reason how unikernels help not only slower programs, but all programs running on it is by improving the level of security. Unikernels dramatically reduce the amount of computing code that is deployed. Beyond that, security is also improved through unikernels thanks to the fact that it uses a single type-safe language as opposed to multiple languages and tons of unused code.
This drastically reduces the attack surface that potential hackers could use to try to break into your system. This should be seen as a major positive aspect of unikernels, especially because hackers are only becoming more effective at hacking into the cloud and accessing private information from companies of all sizes.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are a lot of reasons why unikernels can offer incredibly important improvements to the way that your computing system works. Now that you have the basic facts, it’s time for you to start doing more research to figure out if unikernels are right for you.