The Future OS: Unikernel

Even though in the server regime, Linux is considered to be a rock solid OS. But considering the amount of cyber attacks happening all around the world and the hardware maturity along with the software tools which hackers are able to exploit and fetch over the dark web, things are getting nasty for Linux perhaps. Now let me tell you from last 50 years the server OS has not changed much and even though Unix and Linux like OS’s do co-exist and have comparatively huge amount of market share in the server region being adamant there is always a hope for new technologies to arise.

Now how can we change this let us see and understand the basic working of a VM and then a Linux host OS and the containers and finally let us talk about Unikernel and there various other distro’s used in the industry which are very rare of-course and let me explain this below:

So what the hell is a Unikernel?

Unikernel is nothing but an application that has been churned down to a small, secure, light-weight virtual machine which eliminates general purpose operating systems such as Linux or Windows. Unikernels aims to be a much more secure system than Linux. It does this through several chores and thrusts. Has nothing to do with the users, running a single process per VM, and limiting the amount of code that is incorporated into each VM. This means that there are no users and no shell to login to and, more importantly, you can’t run more than the one program you want to run inside. Now imagine there is no ssh you cannot see the logs even though you do a shell exploit, infact there is no shell inside this. sysdig, tcpdump and mysql-client is not there at all, even a hacker cannot apt-get install any packages etc by remote controlling the targetted machine. No database, hence nothing. This makes it almost a hack proof OS even similar to those of static site generators out there like Jekyll and Hugo.

So what’s next you might be wondering well, just try to get this running on AWS or Google Cloud via installing the OSv or the Unik OS. Happy deploying…