FOSDEM 2025: WASM Meets Unikernels - Secure and Efficient Cloud-Native Deployments

Abstract

This talk explores the intersection of WebAssembly and unikernels to create a flexible, powerful and secure deployment. On one hand, WASM offers unprecedented portability across platforms with almost near-native execution. On the other hand, unikernels can achieve extremely fast boot times, truly strong isolation with low CPU overhead and memory footprint.

The presentation covers the development of a tool that builds and packages WASM unikernels as OCI-compliant images. Additionally, the talk demonstrates the seamless integration of WASM unikernels with Kubernetes through urunc, a unikernel container runtime, which treats them as standard containers.

This end-to-end solution facilitates the building, deployment, and execution of WASM applications in a purely cloud-native manner, achieving a level of security and efficiency that surpasses the traditional container model.