Show HN: KraftCloud – The "Never Pay for Idle" Cloud Platform
kraft.cloudHi 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.
As of today we are now in open early access!
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 open early access 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! Are there instructions for deploying to on-prem? Feedback: I think it would be helpful for the KraftCloud docs to link to the Unikraft docs more often where appropriate. I was skimming around and e.g. https://docs.kraft.cloud/guides/python/#customize-your-appli... shows that besides my app code I need both a Kraftfile and a Dockerfile. Dockerfile is familiar but what is the syntax of Kraftfile? That page describes it as "the KraftCloud specification" but I could not find such a specification in the KraftCloud docs AFAICT. I can Google so I found it here:
https://unikraft.org/docs/cli/reference/kraftfile/v0.6 I also find myself wondering what are the possible values for "runtime" in the Kraftfile? The Unikraft docs say they can be OCI images and "Built in to kraft is a reference to our public-access OCI registry which is hosted simply at unikraft.org"
https://unikraft.org/docs/cli/packaging#oci-based-packages ...but if I go to unikraft.org it's the marketing+docs homepage for Unikraft. Is there something like a Unikraft "Hub" site to browse images? Hi! Thanks for the feedback! Good point on the Kraftfile syntax and as you've seen, there is a reference document. We can make sure to place a link to this in all guides. The term "KraftCloud Specification" is in fact incorrect, this should just be "`Kraftfile` specification". We are working on providing a "Unikraft Hub". Since unikraft.org is a public OCI registry and it works through many popular tools like `crane` or `regtool` as well as our native `kraft` CLI tool; you can actually view it locally by running `kraft pkg ls --all --apps --remote`. Thanks again for the feedback! We'll get on to updating the docs to make these bits clearer! Where do we buy stock in the company? Sounds too good to be true. They should partner with Fly.io as PaaS/deployment partner!