A unikernel experiment: A VM for every URL

The fun thing about this is that you can try it out locally and apparently it took (about) an afternoon to put together (most of the work is in rewriting URLs).

This kind of fast experimentation is going to lead to some really cool things happening with unikernels.

Looks interesting, though this will multiply the number of DNS requests for a page with some images significantly.

This is better than a "container." A Mirage unikernel literally compiles in the pieces of an "OS" as libraries. There is no monolithic operating system with code sitting around waiting to be exploited. The web server in this example is the kernel.

When do we upgrade from IPv6?

I've always thought that something really cool could be done with unikernel for SaaS: you let each of your customer have a VM on their own, spinning the unikernel up when the requests came in, and let it process any request come in, after a while, if the specific user stop requesting then you kill the VM. There seems to be a lot of benefits from that: single user authentication, horizontally scaling is simple ("vertical" scaling also get easier as you can just move VM away), app design will easily let it become an on premise installation. Code upgrade is also easier as it won't disturb everyone at once, and you can upgrade when the VM is not running for a specific user (no hotswap needed). There is definitely operational overhead in a DNS server, but besides that it seems like the benefits would outweight the cons.

I know that's what DabbleDB was doing back then (in Squeak Smalltalk, each of their users has a smalltalk VM serving them). Is there anyone else doing anything similar nowadays?