Merge pull request #15 from amirmc/unikernel-post

add new post on unikernel roundup

blog/_posts/2015-01-19-unikernels-for-everyone.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Unikernels for everyone!"
+author: Amir Chaudhry
+date: 2015-01-19 13:00:00
+tags: [mirage, nymote, ocaml, unikernel]
+description:
+shorturl: http://nymote.org/blog/2015/unikernels-for-everyone/
+---
+{% include JB/setup %}
+
+Many people have now set up unikernels for blogs, documenting their
+experiences for others to follow.  Even more important is that people are
+going beyond static sites to build unikernels that provide more complicated
+services and solve real-world problems.
+
+To help newcomers get started, there are now even more posts that that use
+different tools and target different deployment methods.  Below are summaries
+of some of the posts I found interesting and that will make it easier for you
+try out different ways of creating and deploying your unikernels.
+
+### Unikernel blogs with MirageOS ###
+
+Mindy picked up where the [first set of instructions][jekyll-unikernel]
+finished and described her work to get an Octopress blog running on Amazon EC2.
+As one of the first people outside the core team to work on this, she had a
+lot of interesting experiences — which included getting into the Mirage
+networking stack to debug an issue and submit a bugfix!  More recently, she
+also wrote a couple of excellent posts on *why* she uses a unikernel for her
+blog.  These posts cover the security concerns (and responsibility) of running
+networked services on today's Internet and the importance of owning your
+content — both ideas are at the heart of the work behind [Nymote][] and are
+well worth reading.
+
+- *Mindy's posts*
+  - *Overview* - ["I Am Unikernel (and So Can You!)"][mindy-overview]
+  - *First in her Mirage series* - ["It's a Mirage! (or, How to Shave a Yak.)"][mindy-first]
+  - ["Attack Surface: Why I Unikernel, Part 1"][mindy-uk1]
+  - ["My Content Is Mine: Why I Unikernel, Part 2"][mindy-uk2]
+
+Ian took a different path to AWS deployment by using Vagrant and Test Kitchen
+to to get his static site together and build his unikernel, and then Packer to
+create the images for deployment to EC2.  All succinctly explained with code
+available on GitHub for others to try out!
+
+- *Ian on* ["Mirage with Jekyll on Amazon EC2"][mir-jekyll]
+
+Toby wanted to put together a blog that was a little more complicated than a
+traditional static site, with specific features like subdomains based on tags
+and the ability to set future dates for posts. He also pulled in some other
+libraries so he can use Mustache for sever-side rendering, where his blog
+posts and metadata are stored as JSON and rendered on request.
+
+- *Toby on* ["Building a Blog with MirageOS"][toby-blog]
+
+Chris saw others working to get unikernel blogs on EC2 and decide he'd try
+getting his up and running on Linode instead.  He is the first person to
+deploy his unikernel to Linode and he provided a great walkthough with helpful
+screenshots, as well as brief notes about the handful of differences compared
+with EC2.  Chris also wrote about the issue he had with clean urls (i.e
+serving `/about/index.html` when a user visits `/about/`) — he describes the
+things he tried out until he was finally able to fix it.  
+
+- *Chris' posts*
+  - *Setting up a unikernel* - ["About Not Found"][chris-unikernel]
+  - *Deploying to Linode* - ["Hello Linode"][chris-linode]
+
+Phil focused on getting unikernels running on a cubieboards, which are ARM
+based development boards — similar to the Raspberry Pi. He starts by taking
+Mirage's pre-built [Cubieboard images][arm-tarball] — which makes it easy to
+get Xen and an OCaml environment set up on the board — and getting this
+installed on the Cubieboard.  He also noted the issues he came across along
+with the simple tweaks he made to fix them and finally serves a Mirage hello
+world page.
+
+- *Phil on* ["Some Notes on Building and Running Mirage Unikernels on Cubieboard2"][phil]
+
+
+### More than just static sites ###
+
+Static sites have become the new 'hello world' app. They're simple to manage,
+low-risk and provide lots of opportunities to experience something new.  These
+aspects make them ideal for discovering the benefits (and trade offs) of the
+unikernel approach and I look forward to seeing what variations people come up
+with — For instance, there aren't any public instructions for deploying to
+Rackspace so it would be great to read about someone's experiences there.
+However, there are also many other applications that also fit the above
+criteria of simplicity, low risk and plentiful learning opportunities. 
+
+Thomas Leonard decided to create a unikernel for a simple REST service for
+queuing package uploads for 0install.  His post takes you from the very
+beginning, with a simple hello world program running on Xen, all the way
+through to creating his REST service. Along the way there a lots of code
+snippets and explanations of the libraries being used and what they're doing.
+This is a great use-case for unikernels and there are a lot of interesting
+things to take from this post, for example the ease with which Thomas was able
+to find and fix bugs using regular tools. There's also lots of information on
+performance testing and optimising of the unikernel, which he covers in a
+follow-up post, and he even built tools to visualise the traces. 
+
+- *Thomas' posts*
+  - *Hello world and REST service* - ["My First Unikernel"][tom-unikernel]
+  - *Profiling and optimisations* - ["Optimising the Unikernel"][tom-optimise]
+  - *Tool to visualise traces* - ["Visualising an Asynchronous Monad"][tom-profile]
+
+Of course, there's much more activity out there than described in this post as
+people continually propose ideas on the [Mirage mailing list][mir-mail] — both
+for things they would like to try out and issues they came up against. In my
+[last post][nym-jekyll], I pointed out that the workflow is applicable to any
+type of unikernel and as Thomas showed, with bit of effort it's already
+possible to create useful, real-world services using the many libraries that
+already exist. There's also a lot of scaffolding in the [mirage-skeleton][]
+repo that you can build on which makes it even easier to get involved.  If you
+want to dive deeper into the libraries and perhaps learn OCaml, there are lots
+of [resources online][ocamlorg] and [projects][] to get involved with too.
+
+Now is a great time to try building a unikernel for yourself and as you can
+see from the posts above, shared experiences help other people progress
+further and branch out into new areas. When you've had a chance to try
+something out please do share your experiences online! 
+
+
+<!-- ===== LINKS ===== -->
+
+[jekyll-unikernel]: http://amirchaudhry.com/from-jekyll-to-unikernel-in-fifty-lines/
+[nymote]: http://nymote.org/
+[mindy-overview]: http://www.somerandomidiot.com/blog/2014/08/18/i-am-unikernel/
+[mindy-first]: http://www.somerandomidiot.com/blog/2014/03/14/its-a-mirage/
+[mindy-uk1]: http://www.somerandomidiot.com/blog/2014/08/11/attack-surface-area/
+[mindy-uk2]: http://www.somerandomidiot.com/blog/2014/08/14/my-content-is-mine/
+
+[mir-jekyll]: https://github.com/iw/mirage-jekyll
+
+[toby-blog]: http://ocaml.is-awesome.net/2014/11/building-a-blog-with-mirage-os
+
+[chris-unikernel]: http://christopherbothwell.com/ocaml/mirage/2014/12/03/about-not-found.html
+[chris-linode]: http://christopherbothwell.com/ocaml/mirage/linode/2014/12/08/hello-linode.html
+
+[arm-tarball]: http://blobs.openmirage.org
+[phil]: http://philtomson.github.io/blog/2014/09/10/some-notes-on-building-and-running-mirage-unikernels-on-cubieboard2/
+
+[tom-unikernel]: http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/07/28/my-first-unikernel/ 
+[tom-optimise]: http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/08/15/optimising-the-unikernel/
+[tom-profile]: http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/10/27/visualising-an-asynchronous-monad
+
+[mir-mail]: http://lists.xenproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mirageos-devel
+[nym-jekyll]: http://nymote.org/blog/2014/from-jekyll-site-to-unikernel/
+[mirage-skeleton]: https://github.com/mirage/mirage-skeleton
+[ocamlorg]: http://ocaml.org/learn/books.html
+[projects]: https://github.com/mirage/mirage-www/wiki/Pioneer-Projects