Ask HN: Is Docker just a step on the pathway to Unikernel deployments?

2 pointsandrewstuart2 comments

Seems to me Docker is aiming for a similar thing to Unikernels - i.e. to abstract away the host operating system.

But surely Unikernels are a much more simple way to go?

Is Docker's success really just a stepping stone towards doing away with the host OS entirely via Unikernel deployments?

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Containers seem to be heading more in the direction of VMs. Which would compartmentalize the services of a given application, but then you might need a separate container for a given app. I don't know if you can completely get away from the problem of shipping code to new environments without configuration/customization.

Containers and libOSes/unikernels are two opposite approaches to remove redundant "yo dawg" layers of virtualization. It's not clear to me that a hypervisor+libOS is simpler than a containerized kernel, and Linux seems better maintained than Xen.

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