Fast Starts: Snapshots, Clones, and Warm Slots for MicroVMs

One of the things I care about most in a compute platform is startup time. People say they want fast machine starts. What they usually mean is they do not want to wait while your platform does cold work right in front of them. That distinction matters a lot. If you create a machine from scratch on demand, you are paying for a bunch of slow steps in public: prepare a root filesystem create overlays…