Unikernels vs Containers: An In-Depth Benchmarking Study in the Context of Microservice Applications

Unikernels are a relatively recent way to create and quickly deploy extremely small virtual machines that do not require as much functional and operational software overhead as containers or virtual machines by leaving out unnecessary parts. This paradigm aims to replace bulky virtual machines on one hand, and to open up new classes of hardware for virtualization and networking applications on the other. In recent years, the tool chains used to create unikernels have grown from proof of concept to platforms that can run both new and existing software written in various programming languages. This paper studies the performance (both execution time and memory footprint) of unikernels versus Docker containers in the context of REST services and heavy processing workloads, written in Java, Go, and Python. With the results of the performance evaluations, predictions can be made about which cases could benefit from the use of unikernels over containers.