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"General purpose use case" is an oxymoron.

Are you sure? I'm usually very careful with my usage of figures of speech but I'm no language major so maybe I should clarify that I meant that I could see edge cases but not a general purpose one.

Did this clarify my point or in any other way contribute to your undestanding?

MirageOS is useful for creating single-purpose appliances. That fits well with how the cloud is used today (where you typically end up with one service/app per VM anyway). The autoscaling piece is only one aspect and is only in the early stages, so you shouldn't dwell on it.

The overview page and the ASPLOS paper (linked upthread) and the ACM article [1] will help explain the benefits and trade-offs of the unikernel approach. Other people have also started using unikernels so you can read about their experiences too [2].

[1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628

[2] http://amirchaudhry.com/unikernels-for-everyone/

Thank you, I'm going to read through those carefully.

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