Jitsu: Just-In-Time Summoning of Unikernels

Network latency is a problem for all cloud services. It can be mitigated by moving computation out of remote datacenters by rapidly instantiating local services near the user. This requires an embedded cloud platform on which to deploy multiple applications securely and quickly. We present Jitsu, a new Xen toolstack that satisfies the demands of secure multi-tenant isolation on resource-constrained embedded ARM devices. It does this by using unikernels: lightweight, compact, single address space, memory-safe virtual machines (VMs) written in a high-level language. Using fast shared memory channels, Jitsu provides a directory service that launches unikernels in response to network traffic and masks boot latency. Our evaluation shows Jitsu to be a power-efficient and responsive platform for hosting cloud services in the edge network while preserving the strong isolation guarantees of a type-1 hypervisor.

Anil Madhavapeddy, Thomas Leonard, Magnus Skjegstad, Thomas Gazagnaire, and David Sheets, University of Cambridge; Dave Scott, Citrix Systems R & D; Richard Mortier, Amir Chaudhry, and Balraj Singh, University of Cambridge; Jon Ludlam, Citrix Systems R & D; and Jon Crowcroft and Ian Leslie, University of Cambridge. Usenix NSDI 2015 Oakland, USA.