[andrewstuart]

There are a wide range of tiny operating systems that can boot in a matter of milliseconds.

The applications are "whatever you want imagine" but yes one application is building FAAS Function As A Service in which the operating system carries out a single function.

Put anther way, Docker is complex, overweight, and requires re-implementation of much computing infrastructure. You can meet many of the same goals as Docker in much more simple way not by building containers but by building tiny operating systems.

[jpatokal]

I'm somewhat amused by the idea of booting an operating system from scratch to service a single request being described as "much more simple" than the alternative of, y'know, having a single instance serve many requests.

[Twirrim]

From an ops perspective, spinning up an instance to process a single request seems like

1) a complete and utter nightmare to debug.

2) A huge waste of computing resources. Even with a unikernel you're wasting time initialising resources and getting in to a ready state to be able to process a request. Why bother when you can be ready and respond effectively instantly?

[mritun]

OS does not serve requests -- applications do. While it may be possible to demo a toy OS+app, real-world applications take seconds if not minutes to start and warm up. Throughput on a cold-cache is a fraction of that on a warm cache.

Starting in milli-seconds is not the hard problem. Starting + warming caches in that time is -- that will get you a bunch of awards when you solve it.

[icebraining]

Docker is just a manager of Linux namespaces. You'll need one to manage your operating systems anyway - start/stop them, copy them to the machine, delete them, etc.