The Blog
Engineering notes, scaling stories, and the occasional rant — straight from the team building the cloud for the AI era.
AI Startup? You Need to Think about Scale from Day 1
The era of "move fast, fix infra later" is over for AI companies. It used to be the case that if you were an early stage startup the name of the game would be to get whatever infra would get you started the quickest. That appears to no longer be the case.
Felipe Huici
Co-Founder & CEO
AI Startup? You Need to Think about Scale from Day 1
The era of "move fast, fix infra later" is over for AI companies. It used to be the case that if you were an early stage startup the name of the game would be to get whatever infra would get you started the quickest. That appears to no longer be the case.
We Raised $6M to Build the Future of (AI) Cloud Infrastructure
Today, and after years of hard work, we’re ecstatic to announce the launch of Unikraft Cloud, a radical, new cloud platform based on years of research and providing exponentially better scalability and efficiency (think running millions of strongly isolated instances on a few servers instead of an entire datacenter). In support of this, we’re also super proud to announce our latest $6M seed raise with Heavybit as lead investor, with the participation of Vercel Ventures, Mango Capital, Firestreak Ventures, Fly VC and First Momentum Ventures, along with a host of world class angels.
Running Thousands of Millisecond Headless Browsers on a Single (Cloud) Server
Headless browsers have become a fundamental cog in the AI machine, running as a cloud service for running JavaScript code, scraping websites, automating testing, and integrating with AI agents. A headless browser is, however, a resource-hungry, heavy beast. In this article we show how Unikraft Cloud tech allows for deploying 1000s of these on a single server, while ensuring they can be started in 10s of milliseconds.
SOC2-I Compliance: An Intense but Extremely Valuable Journey
At Unikraft, we recently completed our SOC2 Type 1 audit. What we thought would be a process of improving security turned into a much more valuable journey about company maturity.
The Idle (and Over-provisioned) Cloud
We generally like to think of the cloud handling gazillion requests per second, but a significant part of it is over-provisioned and so idle. In this post we look into the what, how and why what we term "The Idle Cloud" exists, and how to fix it.
The Cloud Engineer's Dilemma (Part 2)
Cold starts, slow autoscale, subpar scale to zero, severe over-provisioning and exploding bills. Must the cloud really be this complex? Part 2 of a two-part series.
Heavy App and Bad Cold Starts? Just Snapshot it!
In the cloud, the heavier the app the slower the start right? In this post we look at the problem and show how with Unikraft Cloud we regularly cold start heavy apps in only 10s of milliseconds
Unikraft Cloud recognized as a Gartner Cool Vendor
Innovative Serverless Cloud Platform Lauded for Speed, Scalability, and Flexibility.
True Serverless with Unikraft Cloud
Based on years of research, we're introducing Unikraft Cloud, the only *true serverless* platform where you can deploy apps and containers without any infra headaches.
High Server Density in the Cloud Should be the Norm, not a Pipedream
In the cloud, running only 10-100 instances/virtual machines per server is commonplace practice. In this post we explore why, and show that with a novel cloud stack designed from first principles it's possible to increase these numbers by orders of magnitude (thousands on a single server).
Serverless is a Broken Promise - Time to Fix it!
Current serverless offerings come with a substantial litany of complex, frustrating and expensive issues that together constitute a far cry from the promise of serverless. In this post we look into why that is, what serverless *should* be, and how to get there.
Millisecond Scale-to-Zero and the Quest to Never Pay for Idle Again
Your workloads are intermittent, but your bill is always on? On Unikraft Cloud, a simple `-0` flag is enough to have any of your apps scale-to-zero. No traffic? No running instance.
Simplifying Deployments with Compose files
In a continued effort towards easing the construction and use-in-production unikernel dream, we're excited to announce that we've introduced initial Compose file support into our tooling.
Unikraft and WebAssembly: Friends or Foes?
We often get asked whether unikernels and WebAssembly are competing technologies. In this article we give background on what unikernels are and explain why they're complementary to WebAssembly.
The History of Unikraft
Unikraft hit 2K stars on Github last week. We take this opportunity to look back at its origins as a research project, its coming of age as a Linux Foundation open source project, and its future as a fundamental game changer for cloud deployments.
Containers and Unikernels: Conceptually Similar, Fundamentally Different, and Inextricably Intertwined.
In the longing for an explanation and comparison between the two, this article demonstrates how conceptually these two models are in fact the same primitive and how Unikraft uses containers to make unikernels.
Introducing Unikraft Cloud
At Unikraft we're introducing Unikraft Cloud a next generation cloud platform powered by technology intended to work in millisecond timescales.
Death to Cold Starts
Cold starts are a real pain. Unikraft Cloud provides cold starts in the order of a few milliseconds with hardware-level isolation; in this post we explain how.
Why the Future of Cloud Deployments is Unikernels – and why with Unikraft that Future is Near
The holy grail of cloud deployments is to be able to have images that are (1) performant and efficient, (2) have strong security and isolation, and (3) are easy to use and have a rich tooling environment around them. Until now, we could only pick 2 out of the 3...emphasis on "until now"
Unikraft vs. UKL: What's the Difference?
UKL is not the right approach towards extremely specialized unikernels.
Unikraft receives 'Best Paper' award at EuroSys21
As part of an on-going effort to deliver performance excellent, Unikraft submits research contributions to the leading European systems conference.
Unikraft named most convincing startup
As part of Technology Ventures Rhein-Neckar's investorSpeed-Dating event in April, Unikraft was named most convincing startup event this April.
Pushing Unikernels into the Mainstream with Unikraft
Unikernels have been around for many years and are famous for providing excellent performance in boot times, throughput, and memory consumption, to name a few metrics.
Cut your Cloud Computing Costs by Half with Unikraft
A novel modular unikernel allows for extreme tailoring of your operating system to your application's needs.
How it all started
Unikraft has become a vibrant Open-Source community, but how did it start and where is it going?
Millisecond Autoscale for Apps: a Pipedream?
In the cloud, you can have fast autoscale for functions, or slow autoscale for apps, but not both. In this blog post we show that on Unikraft Cloud millisecond autoscale for apps is not only possible, but available now.
The Cloud Engineer's Dilemma (Part 1)
Cold starts, slow autoscale, subpar scale-to-zero, severe over-provisioning and exploding bills. Must the cloud really be this complex? Part 1 of a two-part series.