Nanos Alternatives

Reviews and mentions

• OSv Unikernel – Optimizing Guest OS to Run Stateless and Serverless Apps
  news.ycombinator.com | 2021-10-09

  This isn't true.

  Both https://nanos.org and https://ops.city are Go unikernels running on Google Cloud. (I'm with NanoVMs that is the maintainer of these projects.)

• Simple Deno HTTP server running in Nanos unikernel
  dev.to | 2021-08-25

  This short post shows how to get a self-executable Deno HTTP server to run in Nanos using Ops.

• Nanos – unikernel running one and only one application in a virtualized env
  news.ycombinator.com | 2021-07-12
• Ask HN: How are you using unikernels?
  news.ycombinator.com | 2021-05-27

  The HN conversations around unikernels suggest that they're not ready for production yet [0] but feel free to set that record straight.

  In the meantime, a handful of organisations/individuals seem to be working on becoming "Docker for unikernels". That's probably an unfair description, but they're aiming to produce tools for building and managing unikernels: Unikraft [1], NanoVMs/Nanos [2], Unik [3]. Other orgs are producing unikernel-based OSs and VMs [4].

  What is your toolset for building and managing unikernels? What have you learned?

  Bonus question: is Unik dead? [5]

  [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=unikernel&sort=byPopularity&type=story

  [1] https://unikraft.org/

  [2] https://github.com/nanovms/nanos

  [3] https://github.com/solo-io/unik/

  [4] http://unikernel.org/projects/

  [5] https://github.com/solo-io/unik/issues/172

• How to port your OS to EC2
  news.ycombinator.com | 2021-05-21

  You are correct. There are actually quite a few different configurations available on AWS alone - not to mention most cloud providers are very different. What works on one instance type on AWS won't immediately run on Azure without additional drivers.

  Google Cloud is probably the most friendly one for hobby osdev cause they are based on KVM.

  For instance when starting with https://github.com/nanovms/nanos (whom I'm with) we targeted the t2 instances first and it actually took a longer time to come up with support for some of the newer t3 instances because we had to add ENA and NVMe drivers.

• Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist
  news.ycombinator.com | 2021-04-19

  > one could write a program in Unikernel style, as well as have normal programs look more container-like.

  Projects similar to this exist today with https://nanos.org/.

  You can run any typical web app (without having to re-write it) in a POSIX compliant Unikernel on most major cloud providers. Each service runs in its own Unikernel.

  I had its creator on my podcast the other day at: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/79-nanovms-let-you-r...

• Initial VirtualBox/OCI Support Lands in Nanos
  news.ycombinator.com | 2021-02-26
• Do unikernels have a use case on bare metal?
  reddit.com/r/osdev | 2021-01-27

  Having said that, we have been recently rolling in support for AARCH64 (specifically the rpi4) to run unikernels as vms: https://github.com/nanovms/nanos/pull/1384 . The idea is that even though unikernels can be small even the simplest web application like your weather model or webserver might have another application it talks to locally such as a database. If you flash the entire device you have to roll all of that into your one application. However, you could provision multiple unikernels on the same device, keep your configuration/updates and run multiple applications too. This has long been considered too expensive resource wise to do for devices like that and honestly the rpi4 is the first device that has enough power to really make a dent here, but I think looking towards the future we'll see much more powerful devices and this will be a very common model.