Unikraft - The Infrastructure Platform for Building 10ms Sandboxes

6 min read Original article ↗

[01.00]The Future is Here section 01 / 10

Build databases that cold-start in 10 milliseconds.

The compute layer for sandboxes, AI agents, or any workload. VM-grade isolation. Scale to zero in <10ms. Up to 100K+ instances per server.

Deploy on-prem, BYOC or on dedicated hosts - own the full stack.

01 · COLD START<10msall workloads

02 · DENSITY100K+VMs/server

03 · COST10-100×better unit economics

[02.00]Our Customers section 02 / 10

In production at

[03.00]WHY TEAMS SWITCH section 03 / 10

The Definitive AI Cloud Platform

Blaze past the competition!

[04.00]Any Workload section 04 / 10

Use Cases

A sample of all of the use cases that Unikraft Cloud can enable for you

[05.00]Feature Packed section 05 / 10

Advanced Snapshotting Technology & Features

Forking

Fork a live virtual computer in 10 milliseconds, irrespective of its workload (its children too). Fork DBs, sub-agents, parallel headless browsers to retrieve a webpage faster, parallel debugging or build sessions, or whatever your use case demands.

Parent VM forks into child VMs, which fork into grandchild VMsParent microVMChildrenmicroVMs

[06.00]Under the Hood section 06 / 10

Fast, safe, and cheap

See how Unikraft delivers 10ms cold starts, 100K+ instances per server, and 99% infra cost cuts.

[07.00]Secure by Design section 07 / 10

Containers don't contain, and isolates don't isolate

Virtual machineTCB (KVM): ~200–250k LoC

ContainersTCB (Linux kernel): ~40M LoC

Runtime isolationTCB (Linux + v8/Node): ~47M LoC

A larger TCB means more ways out

A sample of recent escapes — every one of them crosses a container or runtime boundary. None of them break out of a VM.

[08.00]Manage it, or not section 08 / 10

Your Cloud, Your Way

Deploy Anywhere

BYOC, on-prem or dedicated host deployments mean you have full access and control of the host. Full customization potential to meet every single one of your needs. Run our platform on bare metal servers but also VMs (e.g., AWS EC2 instances, GCP Compute Engine VM Instances and Azure Virtual Machines).

Kubernetes

Transparently deploy Unikraft as a node in an existing cluster, whether EKS, GKE, AKS or your own. Schedule pods to it — but have them run as strongly-isolated virtual machines that will scale to zero in 10 milliseconds. All of the power of k8s combined with all of the power and features of Unikraft.

Kubernetes Cluster(EKS, GKE, AKS…)

Unikraft Cloudwakes in 10ms

Your Own Linux Distribution, Each Time

Unikraft transparently transforms your Dockerfile into a minimalistic, fast and extremely efficient Linux-based image — your own custom distro with all of the power and flexibility of Linux and none of the crud. Couple this with Unikraft's trimmed down Linux kernel and you're off to the races: run any workload, fast!

Your Distro on Unikraft Cloud

[09.00]Testimonials section 09 / 10

What Our Users Say

Guillermo Rauch

Guillermo Rauch

CEO @ Vercel

When code is generated by AI and deployed automatically, the infrastructure behind it must be radically faster and lighter. That's why Vercel Ventures invested in Unikraft: their cloud infrastructure technology provides exponentially higher efficiency and scalability, along with the strong isolation this new frontier demands.

Neil Jagdish Patel

Neil Jagdish Patel

CEO @ Axiom

Unikraft team has been working on some really cool tech for the next-gen of serverless and now Unikraft Cloud lets anyone use it easily!

Ali Khaej-Hosseini

Ali Khaej-Hosseini

Co-Founder @ Infracost

Imagine running thousands of pods on K8s with just your app code and required libraries, like Alpine images on steroids.'

Dmitry Kolesnikov

Dmitry Kolesnikov

Senior Principal Engineer @ Zalando

You guys are doing cloud rocket science.

Oscar Beaumont

Oscar Beaumont

Rust Engineer at Spacedrive.app

This is some seriously impressive tech. I deployed a Rust + Axum API that can cold-start instantly without requiring any wasm specific modifications like Cloudflare Workers.

Ludwig Trotter

Ludwig Trotter

CEO @ IfGive

This has revolutionised our infrastructure — offering efficiency and scalability at a great price-point. It’ll be a game-changer for all devops workflows.

Shivansh Vi

Shivansh Vi

CEO @ Loophole Labs

The Unikraft folks are doing some incredible engineering!

Sören Bramer Schmidt

Sören Bramer Schmidt

CEO @ Prisma

With Unikraft, we can run over 100,000 strongly isolated PostgreSQL instances on a single machine. That density is unheard of in traditional architectures and fundamentally changes the economics of the game — we’re stepping into a new infrastructure paradigm.

Alex Greaves

Alex Greaves

Co-Founder @ FlutterFlow

Choosing Unikraft to power our platform was one the best decisions we’ve made. It’s a powerful and reliable service and the support is fantastic..

Pekka Enberg

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe @libsqlhq server running with Unikraft Cloud and cold booting in 30 milliseconds 🤯💎🚀"

Riya Bisht

Riya Bisht

Open-Source Contributor

Hail Unikernels!! The future of Cloud Computing is here with Unikraft 🙌

Emad Heydari Beni

Emad Heydari Beni

Researcher at Bell Labs

It is a gorgeous way to build lightweight and secure VM images.

Matthew Anderson

Matthew Anderson

Ex-Director, Equinix Metal Platform Engineering

We took Go codebases we’ve been working with from an average of ~4s startup with Docker on GCP to ~30ms on Unikraft Cloud.

Jonathan Beri

Jonathan Beri

CEO @ Golioth

My favorite unikernel framework.

Shuhao Zhang

Shuhao Zhang

Co-Founder @ Tinyfish

With Unikraft, we successfully scaled our enterprise web agent infrastructure to handle increased demand while maintaining the reliability and performance standards our enterprise customers expect. Working with the Unikraft team has been exceptional - their expertise and responsiveness made our deployment smooth and successful.

Kelsey Hightower

Kelsey Hightower

Formerly @ Google

Looks like the unikernel folks were on to something. Compute platforms are trending towards orchestrating micro virtual machines purpose built for running a single application.

Chris Esplin

Chris Esplin

Podcast Host @ highlight.io

Unikraft and Unikraft Cloud are messing with my head. It's a step change in cloud performance.

Darren Shepherd

Darren Shepherd

Creator of K3s

I was actually more impressed with unikernels with Unikraft than WASM. (And that is saying a lot if you know how I feel about unikernels).

Christoph Berger

Christoph Berger

Author AppliedGo

If you want both security and lightness... you can actually have it!

Juan Cruz Viotti

Juan Cruz Viotti

CEO @ SourceMeta

I am very impressed with Unikraft. These people are pioneering a next generation approach to cloud computing that is much faster, secure, and sustainable than anything else I’ve seen in the space. This will be bigger than the Docker revolution from the past decade.

Ikechi Obiajunwa

Ikechi Obiajunwa

Founder @ onepod.ai

This is certainly the future of zero-cost amortized compute per user 💯

[10.00]GET STARTED section 10 / 10

Deploy with superior economics

Talk to an engineer or jump straight into Unikraft Cloud. No setup, no commitment.