PostgreSQL

I'm behind the times—apparently folks have been running Postgres on unikernels for quite some time†.

https://www.prisma.io/blog/announcing-prisma-postgres-early-access
https://nanovms.com/dev/tutorials/running-postgres-as-a-unikernel †

Building @warpcast and @farcaster. Previously Coinbase, Brigade, Causes.

That's not what I immediately took away, but yes that seems like a potential advantage. In my mind the key point was that the benefits of unikernels, namely:

- Reduced resource footprint and improved perf (no normal OS overhead of daemons, no kernel/user-space separation and thus less overhead from context switching or syscalls)
- Fast boot and shutdown times (not a full OS)
- Direct hardware access

...means that we can more densely pack a single baremetal machine with potentially thousands of database instances, since computation can be performed with a greater degree of liquidity (resources for different instances are only used when they are actually needed).

is the idea that if you have file systems that are horizontally scalable and provide low latency, infinite IO then you would want low latency compute to spin up postgres to process queries on demand?

Damn, Prisma is doing some impressive work!