# Unikernels: library operating systems for the cloud *2013-03-01 — paper* Authors: Anil Madhavapeddy, Richard Mortier, Charalampos Rotsos, Dave Scott, Balraj Singh, Thomas Gazagnaire, Steven Smith, Steven Hand, Jon Crowcroft We present unikernels, a new approach to deploying cloud services via applications written in high-level source code. Unikernels are single-purpose appliances that are compile-time specialised into standalone kernels, and sealed against modification when deployed to a cloud platform. In return they offer significant reduction in image sizes, improved efficiency and security, and should reduce operational costs. Our Mirage prototype compiles OCaml code into unikernels that run on commodity clouds and offer an order of magnitude reduction in code size without significant performance penalty. The architecture combines static type-safety with a single address-space layout that can be made immutable via a hypervisor extension. Mirage contributes a suite of type-safe protocol libraries, and our results demonstrate that the hypervisor is a platform that overcomes the hardware compatibility issues that have made past library operating systems impractical to deploy in the real-world. See also: [Unikernels wins the ASPLOS most influential paper award](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/unikernels-test-of-time). DOI: 10.1145/2451116.2451167 Classification: full Venue: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on architectural support for programming languages and operating systems (ASPLOS) URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2451116.2451167 Projects: Unikernels ## Related - [An antibotty defensive testbed to protect network services](https://anil.recoil.org/ideas/antibotty-testbed) (idea, 2026-08-01) - [The Internet needs an antibotty immune system, stat](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/internet-immune-system) (note, 2026-04-08) - [Unikernels wins the ASPLOS most influential paper award](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/unikernels-test-of-time) (note, 2025-04-12) - [Haskell Symposium 2014 Keynote on functional OS design](https://anil.recoil.org/videos/ed84b2eb-1b93-4dc3-b746-63a4af13d4ea) (video, 2014-09-05) - [Unikernels: library operating systems for the cloud](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/2013-asplos-mirage-1) (note, 2013-03-01) - [Unikernels](https://anil.recoil.org/projects/unikernels) (project, 2010-01-01) --- Canonical: https://anil.recoil.org/papers/2013-asplos-mirage Type: paper License: CC BY 4.0 Tags: mirageos, unikernels, systems, cloud, ocaml, security, conference, unikernels