Felipe Huici

Dr. Felipe Huici is CEO and Co-Founder at Unikraft UG, a start-up dedicated to lightweight and open source virtualization technologies and significantly lowering cloud infrastructure bills. In addition, Felipe is a chief researcher at NEC Laboratories Europe in Heidelberg, Germany where his main research and interests lie in the areas of high-performance software systems, and in particular specialization, virtualization and security. He has been published in several top-tier conferences and journals such as SOSP, ASPLOS, OSDI, Eurosys, SIGCOMM, NSDI, CoNEXT, and SIGCOMM CCR. Finally, Felipe is one of the founders and maintainers of the Linux Foundation Unikraft open source project.


Sessions

07-13
16:05
30min
Building a Just-in-Time Python FaaS Platform with Unikraft
Felipe Huici, Alexander Jung

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.

Infrastructure: Cloud & Hardware
Liffey Hall 1