Today, unikernels took to the stage at DockerCon EU in Barcelona!

As part of the Cool Hacks session in the closing keynote, Anil Madhavapeddy (MirageOS project lead), showed how unikernels can be treated as any other container. He first used Docker to build a unikernel microservice and then followed up by deploying a real web application with database, webserver and PHP code all running as distinct unikernel microservices built using Rump Kernels. Docker managed the unikernels just like Linux containers but without needing to deploy a traditional operating system!

This kind of integration helps put unikernels into the hands of developers everywhere and combines the familiar tooling and real-world workflows of the container ecosystem with the improved security, efficiency and specialisation of unikernels. We’ll finish off this post with details of how you can get involved — but first, before we go into Anil’s demonstration in more detail, some background about why unikernels matter, and why it makes sense to use Docker this way.

Read more at Unikernel.org.

Microsoft continues its work on creating a home for Docker on Windows. Thursday’s release of Windows Server 2016 release candidate 4 (RC 4) introduces a new kind of Docker Windows container, secured within the company’s virtualization machine, Hyper-VM.

Hyper-V containers use the same image format as the Docker containers that run on Windows — which the company introduced in preview form earlier this year — but they offer the greater isolation provided by a virtual machine.

Although the Microsoft first announced the idea of Hyper-V Containers a year ago, “This is the first time the world gets to play with them,” said Taylor Brown, principal programming management lead at Microsoft.