I’m one of the authors of Stardust - thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to look at it and share their thoughts here.
The project started with two questions:
- How small can a deployment unit be while still supporting real service workloads?
- What if distributed systems were built from components that can be deployed quickly or dynamically relocated across a network?
Instead of large virtual machines or container images, we turned to Unikernels; tiny, and easily deployable anywhere a hypervisor runs. If deployment becomes cheap, we can rethink system design: mobile agents, compute-near-data, ephemeral tasks, dynamic composition, and so on.
Stardust lets us explore that space, and both the C and Rust versions are stable.
Stateful services are possible with Unikernels, though library porting still takes work, and there’s plenty of room for innovation around hypervisor and tooling. WebAssembly is a promising direction as well, though it would require adapting Stardust to support an appropriate runtime. Some Unikernels have already gone down that path, and there’s definitely room for more experimentation.
The project started with two questions:
- How small can a deployment unit be while still supporting real service workloads?
- What if distributed systems were built from components that can be deployed quickly or dynamically relocated across a network?
Instead of large virtual machines or container images, we turned to Unikernels; tiny, and easily deployable anywhere a hypervisor runs. If deployment becomes cheap, we can rethink system design: mobile agents, compute-near-data, ephemeral tasks, dynamic composition, and so on.
Stardust lets us explore that space, and both the C and Rust versions are stable.
Stateful services are possible with Unikernels, though library porting still takes work, and there’s plenty of room for innovation around hypervisor and tooling. WebAssembly is a promising direction as well, though it would require adapting Stardust to support an appropriate runtime. Some Unikernels have already gone down that path, and there’s definitely room for more experimentation.