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Citadea Core-VM

Firecracker micro-VMs in under 50 ms

Compute that appears in milliseconds and disappears when you are done — with the isolation of a virtual machine and the speed of a container.

Overview

Lightweight Firecracker-based micro-VMs designed for fully ephemeral, instantly scalable compute. VM-grade isolation at container speed, billed by the second, with a warm pool that absorbs spikes.

Built on Firecracker, not legacy hypervisors

Core-VM runs each workload in a Firecracker micro-VM on KVM, giving you hardware-level tenant isolation without the weight of a traditional VM. A warm pool keeps boot times under 50 ms so bursty and serverless workloads feel instant.

Priced by the second, networked with eBPF

You pay for the seconds you use. Networking is eBPF/Cilium-based for fast, programmable, observable connectivity, and images are OCI/Docker-compatible so your existing build pipeline just works.

Compared to Modal, AWS Lambda or generic OVH VPS.

What's included

  • Boot in under 50 ms
  • Firecracker hypervisor (KVM)
  • OCI / Docker-compatible images
  • Hardware-level tenant isolation
  • Warm VM pool
  • Per-second billing

Technical specs

  • Dedicated vCPUs
  • ECC RAM
  • Local NVMe storage
  • eBPF / Cilium networking

Quickstart

$ citadea core-vm create --image debian-12 --tier dev

Benchmarks

< 50 ms
Cold start
< 10 ms
Warm pool

Use cases

Ephemeral CI/CDServerless functionsIsolated code executionLoad testing

Integrations

DockerOCIGitHub ActionsCitadea CLI

Frequently asked