I think you've touched on it in regards to ecosystem maturity. When ever I traipse through this topic I do find mostly research projects. I know there are startups in this space, but I think it'd be hard to show a $$ value proposition for them, so I can understand why most things look quite research focused instead.
I think it's likely that instead of a generic unikernel ecosystem and companies built around that, we could instead see very specifically targeted unikernel applications as SaaS offerings. And as consumers of such a service we might not even know (or care) they are unikernel hosted at all, just that they're faster. E.g. my comment below about DB unikernels.
If, say, e.g. Snowflake were to run bare on the hypervisor for extra oomph... it wouldn't impact their customers beyond some rather transparent performance improvements. And such a thing would be done only if there was profit in it that would exceed the R&D costs -- put another way, if you're a company considering this, you could either buy more and bigger hardware, or invest in unikernel... former is far less risk.
Which is why I think where we'd see action in this space would be from very specific performance oriented spaces. E.g. super low latency transaction processing for e.g. telecomes, finance / high-frequency-trading, ad-tech RTB, games ... rather than say large scale analytic workloads.
I think it's likely that instead of a generic unikernel ecosystem and companies built around that, we could instead see very specifically targeted unikernel applications as SaaS offerings. And as consumers of such a service we might not even know (or care) they are unikernel hosted at all, just that they're faster. E.g. my comment below about DB unikernels.
If, say, e.g. Snowflake were to run bare on the hypervisor for extra oomph... it wouldn't impact their customers beyond some rather transparent performance improvements. And such a thing would be done only if there was profit in it that would exceed the R&D costs -- put another way, if you're a company considering this, you could either buy more and bigger hardware, or invest in unikernel... former is far less risk.
Which is why I think where we'd see action in this space would be from very specific performance oriented spaces. E.g. super low latency transaction processing for e.g. telecomes, finance / high-frequency-trading, ad-tech RTB, games ... rather than say large scale analytic workloads.