TLDR Tech / Dev
How Vercel Cut Build Wait Times From 90 Seconds To 5
Vercel cut build provisioning from 90s to 5s with Hive, an internal platform built on AWS Firecracker microVMs. This was needed because they run untrusted customer code on shared hardware, where containers' shared kernel is too risky and normal VMs are too slow to spin up per build. The 18x gain came from stacking three things: faster cold boots, a warm pool of pre-booted cells for the common case, and Firecracker's millisecond boot that makes the pool viable.
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