Hey HN, since our pivot earlier this year we have been working with the alpha users of our product shuttle (YC S20) on creating the best backend development experience possible. Interacting with hundreds of developers, we have become convinced that the time has come to rethink the virtualization layer that we are all so used to - containers. Don’t get us wrong, containers have improved development in a lot of ways, but over time they have also created a lot of problems too.

For the way most people use them in deployments of web apps, containers are too heavy. The heavier your containers are, the more difficult everything else becomes. They take longer to build, they need more resources to run, they are more expensive to store, etc. This has significant repercussions for the developers that have to deal with containers, IOW most backend developers.

Our view is that by restricting the scope of virtualization to something more specific to web app backends, we can build a tool that is much better for the job than containers. With WASM and WASI becoming stable, this is more possible than ever.

We’re very excited to share our ideas with you and would love to get your thoughts on this!