Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms are one of the key service offerings for any cloud provider. To provide strong isolation, the functions are run inside heavy-weight virtual machines (and within containers inside those for orchestration reasons). Consequently, such instances take too long to boot and so are kept on all the time, even though the functions only receive requests intermittently. The end result is that current FaaS platforms are much less efficient than they could be.

We will introduce a radically novel way to build FaaS platforms based on Python and the Unikraft Linux Foundation open source project (www.unikraft.org). Unikraft is a toolkit for building fully specialized, cloud-ready virtual machines called unikernels targeting a single application . Using Unikraft we can construct extremely specialized, Python-based unikernels that use only a few MBs to run a boot in 10s of milliseconds, allowing us to bring VMs up as a request to a function comes in, and to shut it down (or suspend it) afterwards. The result: a Python-based FaaS platform that is significantly more efficient and cheaper to operate than existing offerings.

In the talk we will provide an introduction to Unikraft, how Python is built on top of it, a full description of the FaaS platform and a short demo.