Why we run V8 isolates on our own bare metal

Most edge platforms rent their capacity. Your function runs inside someone else's network, on someone else's hardware, behind someone else's billing meter. It works — until you need a guarantee that the layer underneath you won't change. We took the other path: the edge runtime runs V8 isolates on bare metal we own and operate.

Isolates, not containers

A container has to boot. An isolate doesn't. V8 isolates share a single process and spin up a fresh, sandboxed JavaScript context in well under a millisecond, so there's no cold-start penalty waiting for an OS image to come alive. Your code executes against standard Web APIs — Request, Response, fetch, streams — so there's no proprietary runtime to learn and nothing to rewrite if you ever leave.

Why owning the metal matters

When you own the machine, the numbers stop being someone else's abstraction. Cold starts are single-digit milliseconds because there is no container scheduler and no multi-tenant queue in front of you. There are no surprise egress fees between our own regions because the bytes never leave a network we control. And there is no third party in the request path: our WAF, DDoS shield, CDN, and rate-limiter are the only things between a user and your code.

The trade-off we accept

Owning infrastructure is harder than renting it. We run the hardware, the network, and the control plane ourselves. We think that's the point: a developer platform that depends on a competitor's PaaS in its own operations is one pricing change away from a bad day. Self-sufficiency is the feature.