ZeroVM

ZeroVM was an open-source lightweight virtualization technology developed by the Israeli startup, LiteStack. Founded by Camuel Gilyadov, Constantine Peresypkin, and Dmitri Bortok, the company's first commit to its Git repository occurred in November 2011. The venture participated in the Techstars Cloud 2013 incubator program, securing $500,000 in seed funding from investors including Techstars and Resonant Venture Partners. In October 2013, Rackspace acquired LiteStack, and the ZeroVM team became Rackspace's Israeli R&D center.

At its core, ZeroVM was designed to virtualize a single process rather than an entire operating system, enabling a startup overhead of approximately 5 milliseconds. This was achieved by using Google's Native Client (NaCl) platform to create a secure sandbox around an application, preventing it from accessing the host operating system. The technology was not a direct competitor to full-system virtualization like KVM or containers like Docker; instead, it focused on running a single application in a highly isolated and efficient userspace environment. A key feature was its deterministic nature; for a given input, ZeroVM would always produce the same output, as elements like time functions consistently returned zero.

The primary business application for ZeroVM was to bring computation directly to data. The technology could be embedded within existing storage systems, such as OpenStack Swift, through a middleware component called ZeroCloud. This allowed developers to execute code directly on storage nodes, a significant advantage for processing large datasets in parallel, such as in MapReduce tasks, video transcoding, or image analysis. By running applications close to the data, it aimed to reduce latency and improve security for multi-tenant cloud environments. Applications intended for ZeroVM had to be cross-compiled using a provided toolchain, and they interacted with the outside world through predefined channels that appeared as file descriptors within the sandboxed environment.

Keywords: lightweight virtualization, process sandboxing, Google Native Client, NaCl, Rackspace, LiteStack, Camuel Gilyadov, Constantine Peresypkin, Techstars Cloud, OpenStack Swift, ZeroCloud, data-local computation, secure execution environment, serverless computing, cloud hypervisor, embedded virtualization, deterministic execution, in-situ processing, software fault isolation, single-process virtualization