MirageManager: Enabling stateful migration for unikernels

Unikernels are a new lightweight virtualization technology born as an alternative to virtual machines and containers. Geared towards service provisioning for the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing, they offer extremely small memory footprint and strong isolation properties. However, the unikernels ecosystem is still in its infancy and lacks quintessential functionalities found in more well-established virtualization technologies. For example, stateful migration is a highly desired feature for mobile edge services in distributed environments which is not yet supported by unikernels. This is one of the shortcomings preventing us from reaping the full benefits of unikernels outside of stateless applications. In this work, we aim bridging this gap with MirageManager: A ready-to-deploy unikernel migration system enabling lossless migration supported by a function-level, application logic check-pointing library of our design. Our evaluation results show that MirageManager is able to lower the service downtime by ∼80%, and drastically reduce the state transfer data by almost ∼100% when comparing against Podman. Additionally, MirageManager also beats Podman, a container-based engine, in parallel service migration across constrained edge networks reducing the overall migration time by up to ∼6x.