Introducing KraftCloud
Painful cold starts, slow auto-scale times, minutes-long waits for compute nodes to be up: these are standard headaches that cloud engineers have to deal with, and work-around, on a daily basis. Much of this stems from the fact that cloud infrastructure relies on technology that was never intended to be reactive in millisecond scales, or at least within the round-trip time of a user request.
At Unikraft we’re introducing KraftCloud, a next generation cloud platform powered by technology intended to work in millisecond timescales. KraftCloud is the culmination of years of award-winning reseach (see here or here) into lightweight virtualization, showing that it is entirely possible to have extremely efficient and nimble deployments that still retain the strong isolation and security of virtual machines. We’re currently in closed beta: fill out a brief signup form at https://kraft.cloud/signup, get an access token within 24 hours, and get started with this quick start guide.
But before you get started, I wanted to list some of the KraftCloud features we’re excited about and that make us informally call it the millisecond platform:
