Leaving Legacy Behind

Explore a groundbreaking approach to reducing the carbon footprint of network services using MirageOS unikernels in this 52-minute conference talk from the 36C3 event. Dive into the world of minimalist, secure network services built with OCaml, a programming language that guarantees memory safety. Learn about composing small, open-source libraries to create special-purpose services that can run as virtual machines, sandboxed processes, or in smaller containments. Discover how this approach significantly reduces the trusted computing base, decreases resource usage, and improves boot times compared to conventional systems. Examine various digital infrastructure applications, including web services, VPN gateways, calendar servers, DNS servers, and a minimalistic orchestration system. Gain insights into the MirageOS project's history, recent developments in deployment and integration, and the benefits of type-safe component integration using OCaml's module types.