I’ve been working on Ignite to bridge the gap between the security of Firecracker Micro-VMs and the usability of Docker. I just want to use Micro-VM as easily as docker containers.
The Problem: Firecracker is amazing for isolation (used by AWS Lambda), but using it manually requires managing kernel images, rootfs drives, and tap interfaces. It lacks the "run and done" experience of containers.
The Solution: Ignite is a standalone daemon and CLI written in Rust (using Tokio) that handles the heavy lifting:
OCI-to-Block: It pulls standard OCI images (Docker Hub), flattens the layers, and formats them into an ext4 block device that the VM uses as rootfs.
Networking: I implemented a custom VXLAN mesh to allow VMs to communicate across nodes without needing external heavy orchestration.
Speed: Cold boots in ~100ms.
It is currently v1.0 and runs on Linux (KVM) and WSL2. I’d love feedback. Happy to answer questions!