Jitsu: Just-in-Time Summoning of Unikernels (new directions in operating systems) / Nov 2014
New Directions in Operating Systems talk on Jitsu at a workshop in London. Jitsu demonstrated just-in-time summoning of unikernels - the ability to boot MirageOS unikernels in milliseconds in response to network requests. This was a breakthrough for unikernel practicality, showing that you could have the security and efficiency benefits of unikernels without sacrificing responsiveness. The system worked by keeping unikernels in a suspended state and waking them up on demand, dramatically reducing the overhead compared to traditional VMs. It was a fun piece of work that combined DNS tricks with hypervisor optimizations to create something that felt almost magical in its speed.