Where Nimbus fits

Nimbus sits at a different point in the design space than microVM sandboxes like E2B and Daytona, container platforms like Cloudflare’s container Sandbox SDK, and in-process stub filesystems. Each makes a different tradeoff.

No native Linux software; in return, fast boots, $0 idle cost, and a disk that persists across processes.

MicroVMs and containers run native Linux software. Nimbus does not. In-process stubs stay inside the host process and do not provide real toolchains. Nimbus instead boots in ~0.6 s median with no warm pool, costs $0 while idle, and has a 10 GB disk. In a sequential comparison it measured ~3× faster than the container Sandbox SDK: 0.61 s vs 1.95 s median. Vite HMR took 302 ms median. The benchmarks page has the method and caveats.

Nimbus’s userland began as LIFO OS by Sanket Sahu: the shell interpreter, the coreutils, and the Node.js shim. Nimbus carries that userland onto Cloudflare Durable Objects and adds per-process isolates, the SQLite-backed 10 GB disk, port routing, and the in-session toolchains.

Workloads that need Docker, native wheels, GPUs, or raw TCP listeners are out of scope. The full “no” list is in capabilities & limits.