&gt;What if cloud providers offered secure containers on bare metal, under a shared OS kernel?<p>Then they&#x27;re offering a very similar thing. And the questions then are things like:<p>What should the interface between contained and outside look like?<p>Is there value in running a traditional unix userland inside the container?<p>What kind of code do we want to run inside the container?<p>IMO the unikernel answers to these questions are better. The Unix userland is an accident of history; if unikernels had come first we wouldn&#x27;t even think of it.