Show HN: Kedge – Full-stack cloud with forkable VM snapshots and global SQLite

I'm building Kedge, a globally distributed platform for stateful serverless apps. Here's how you make a simple static site: `echo '# Hello world!' | ssh kedge.dev'

I helped build Fly.io for 4 years and shared enthusiasm for the founders' vision of a 'global Heroku'. While there, I wrote "The Serverless Server" (https://fly.io/blog/the-serverless-server/) as a study of Lambda and a sketch of a modern serverless product built around lightweight VMs. That essay was the initial inspiration for Kedge.

Kedge has a fast VM orchestrator that can create code sandboxes or scale service instances in 3ms, using a combination of forkable VM snapshots and a tree of warm pools (Linux kernel -> base runtime -> app). VMs are memory-dense thanks to shared copy-on-write memory pages. You can run lightweight CGI-style functions, public OCI images, or source code for BuildKit to compile and deploy.

Kedge's global control plane sits on an eventually-consistent SQLite database. Taking inspiration from Corrosion and Litestream, I built a local-first, multi-writer CRDT-based replication system backed by object storage, and just recently made it open source (https://github.com/wjordan/syzy).

You can also use a SQLite client to query `/shared.db` from any instance for a build-in replicated database in your app. This lets Kedge autoscale services close to your users while each instance queries its local replica for eventually-consistent data, with no need to micro-manage instance or volume placement. (There's also a /shared/ filesystem adapter for convenience.)

Kedge can even use this same database for stateful, server-rendered HTML apps. Data attributes bind forms, buttons, and values to records in the app database, Kedge compiles the schema and operations at deploy-time, and then queries the local data to serve requests. As a demo, I made a Hacker News clone with story submission, votes, comments and auth in about 60 lines of Markdown, plus CSS (https://kedge.dev/docs/html-apps#kedger-news).

I've just started collecting public feedback, so please let me know what you think! I'm particularly interested in feedback on the stateful HTML app model, which is the newest (and most ambitious) piece. The preview is currently running in 11 regions for you to kick the tires. There's no billing yet, so the pricing page is an estimate. Thanks for taking a look!

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49099434

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