"WASM meets unikernels: Secure and Efficient Cloud-Native Deployments" ( 2025 )

Sunday at 10:00, 25 minutes, K.4.601, K.4.601, WebAssembly Charalampos Mainas Anastassios Nanos , slides , video

This talk explores the intersection of WebAssembly and unikernels to create a flexible, powerful and secure deployment. On one hand, WASM offers unprecedented portability across platforms with almost near-native execution. On the other hand, unikernels can achieve extremely fast boot times, truely strong isolation with low CPU overhead and memory footprint. The presentation covers the development of a tool that builds and packages WASM unikernels as OCI-compliant images. Additionally, the talk demonstrates the seamless integration of WASM unikernels with Kubernetes through urunc, a unikernel container runtime, which treats them as standard containers. This end-to-end solution facilitates the building, deployment, and execution of WASM applications in a purely cloud-native manner, achieving a level of security and efficiency that surpasses the traditional container model.