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Unikraft Launches KraftCloud: Never Pay for Idle Again

Article news.ycombinator.com

Unikraft Launches KraftCloud: Never Pay for Idle Again

Hi everyone, it’s Alex, Simon, Felipe and the team from Unikraft.io

We have built kraft.cloud, a millisecond cloud platform, where apps and services cold start, scale to zero and autoscale in milliseconds, ensuring you never pay for idle, can efficiently cope with traffic peaks, and don’t have to deal with complex cold start issues.

The platform (and we) come from research in the area of lightweight virtualization — trying to ask the question of how efficient cloud platforms could (or should) be while still retaining strong, hardware-level isolation. KraftCloud is the result of this research followed by years of building the Unikraft open source project (www.unikraft.org).

KraftCloud is based on unikernels, extremely specialized virtual machines, built on top of the Linux-API compatible Unikraft project. If you’ve heard of unikernels in the past, you’ve likely come across properties like millisecond cold start, small memory consumption, and small TCB, to name a few. You may have also heard of downsides like difficulty using them, debugging them, monitoring them or deploying them in the cloud — we’ve been hard at work tackling these issues.

KraftCloud leverages Unikraft unikernels, but also comes with a custom-built controller that can be reactive in millisecond scales and can scale to thousands of instances on a single server. We also have integrations with Dockerfiles, Terraform and Kubernetes, and the ability to deploy within hyperscaler infra. The end result is a platform where

- Cold starts take milliseconds (e.g., NGINX boots in 15ms)

- Scale to Zero (and scale back up) also takes milliseconds

- Autoscale takes milliseconds so you can transparently cope with fast peaks

- We can put 1000s of instances on a single server, reducing cost and carbon footprint

We’re in closed beta at the moment and are actively handing (free) access tokens via the sign up form here: http://kraft.cloud/signup

We would really appreciate as much feedback as humanly possible: what you like, what you don’t like, what isn’t clear, what we’re missing, what’s broken, etc (you can find more information in our FAQs: https://unikraft.io/faq, or this blog post: https://unikraft.io/blog/kraftcloud/

Thanks so much for reading all the way to the end and looking forward to your comments!

Discussion 28 comments · 82 points · nderjung · 2024-04-02
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