True Serverless with Unikraft Cloud

On paper, the promise of serverless was that you’d take your app, deploy it, and the platform would ensure you don’t have to deal with any infra problems. The reality lies far from this ideal however, and so, in addition to developing and deploying the app, developers have to constantly devote cycles to mitigating against infrastructure issues and limitations such as painfully slow cold starts, autoscale, and scale-to-zero that users notice when apps are put to scaling or put to sleep; leaving instances always-on even though their receiving little-to-no traffic; over-provisioning to meet potential scaling demands; and, extreme workarounds such as (I kid you not) pinging instances just to keep them warm¹!

If the above sounds like a lot of complex verbiage it’s because today being a developer or cloud engineer is fundamentally difficult due to the platforms’ technical limitations. At Unikraft, we’re delivering the only true serverless cloud platform, where you simply deploy your app and we take care of infra issues for you — serverless as it should have been!

To achieve this, we spent a considerable amount of time (including years of prior research into lightweight virtualization and unikernels) ensuring that applications deployed on our platform, no matter how heavy, feel like a function call which can be invoked as-and-when necessary and not consume any resources until it’s absolutely needed. All of this while ensuring that deploying apps is as simple as possible. Briefly, Unikraft Cloud provides:

• Millisecond everything: fast cold starts, scale-to-zero (both for wake up and sleep, and optionally stateful) and autoscale — even for heavy apps like Java SpringBoot and Ruby on Rails.

• Superior economics: millisecond scale-to-zero means you only pay for when your app is up; and also results in excellent server density, especially for intermittent and bursty workloads (think thousands of instances on a single machine).

• No more compromises: Run containers or functions, for a short or a very long while, with strong hardware-level isolation.

• Ease of use: Deploy with a single CLI one-liner via our open-source CLI tool kraft, and use Dockerfiles and Composefiles to do so.

In all, we think true serverless is fundamentally about reverting the trend of increasingly difficult platforms that dump infra issues onto cloud engineers and developers — and bring it back to a place where you can truly focus on your app. If you are interested, in our previous article about serverless we go into a lot more detail about the issues with the serverless landscape and how we go about solving them.

Deployment Models

We believe the platform shouldn’t dictate how you deploy. Unikraft Cloud provides three deployment models to cater to your infra needs.

A fully-managed, hosted platform

As an app developer, focusing on building and deploying without managing the underlying infrastructure is crucial. We provide a fully managed platform which addresses this need by providing you an environment which requires minimal setup, allowing you to concentrate on your app and core business tasks.

Simply put: you do the app, we do the infra. Get started today by signing up for a free account to experience true serverless first-hand that enables you to deploy your applications easily and without infra headaches.

Cloud-Prem

Whether you’re an existing AWS customer or wish to rent servers from providers like Equinix or Hetzner, deploying Unikraft Cloud within your cloud account provides you with the flexibility to leverage your existing cloud setup whilst benefiting from Unikraft Cloud’s optimizations.

We provide gradual migration paths so that you can slowly shift your workloads onto your Unikraft Cloud servers. Millisecond scale-to-zero allows for thousands of instances to be hosted on a single server and helps with cost management.

To deploy Unikraft Cloud in your cloud account, contact sales.

On-Prem

Deploying Unikraft Cloud directly on your bare-metal servers optimizes performance, reduces latency and allows you to better utilize your existing resources. Maintain complete control over your infrastructure, whether within your own data centers or co-locations, and benefit from the same millisecond scale-to-zero and autoscale features as our hosted platform or cloud-prem model.

Identical to our Cloud-Prem deployment model, we provide gradual migration paths so that you can slowly shift your workloads onto your Unikraft Cloud servers.

To learn more about running Unikraft Cloud on your own hardware please contact sales.