Russell Pavlicek discusses the potential of unikernels to revolutionize cloud computing architectures. Unikernels are specialized virtual machines that are compiled to do one task only, making them very small, secure, and fast to boot. Several unikernel projects are highlighted, such as MirageOS, ClickOS, and Rump Kernels. Unikernels could enable transient microservices with lifetimes measured in fractions of a second and populations in the thousands per server host. Open source is leading the innovation in this area through projects like Xen Project, which is working to enable thousands of virtual machines per host and drive the next generation cloud.