Exploring structural deduplication for microVMs.
Benchmark Data
Performance Results
Comparing cold starts and build times between Russel and legacy container runtimes.
Cold Build
62x faster
Incremental Build
3.9x faster
VM Boot Time
Currently slower than containers.
MicroVM snapshots arriving in Phase 1.
Disk Scaling
Per new instance via QCOW2
Cross-App Dedupe
New app with shared runtime
Beyond Container Layers
Traditional container caching works at the image layer level. Russel redefines deduplication by moving it into the host virtualization stack.
Instead of layering filesystems that must be pulled and unpacked, we map immutable structural blocks directly into isolated microVMs as read-only volumes. This eliminates the "cold pull" bottleneck entirely.
- → Block vs Layer: Deduplication happens across all tenants at the MicroVM transport level.
- → Zero-Copy: Foundations are shared once in host RAM and mapped explicitly via virtio-fs.
- → Atomic Deploys: App updates are just pointer swaps in the shared storage engine.
The Core Concept
Exploring serverless efficiency
Investigating if we can bend the trade-off between performance and efficiency.
The Problem
Containers bundle entire runtimes. Every deploy duplicates 100MB+ blocks.
The Solution
Separate code from shared foundations. Map payloads to pre-warmed VMs.
Isolation
Hardware-isolated kernel per tenant. Zero-trust by design.
Updates
Patch foundation once, apply to all VMs. Security without rebuilds.
System Architecture
How Russel Works
Modular architecture: CLI → Control Plane → Rust Engine + Shared Cache
russel-engine (Rust)
Shared Runtime Cache
Immutable, content-addressed, and shared across all VMs.
Isolated MicroVM
Vision & Roadmap
Future Directions
Speed
Implementing faster boot using VM snapshots to reduce startup time from seconds to milliseconds.
Scaling
Adding horizontal scaling with built-in reverse proxy for fast load balancing and traffic management.
Orchestration
Expanding to multi-node orchestration for distributed workloads and maximum high availability.
Vision
Hardware virtualization meets declarative state management for the next generation of cloud infrastructure.