5x faster Edge Functions: v8 isolates to Firecracker MicroVMs

Netlify has rebuilt its Edge Functions infrastructure to run customer code in Firecracker MicroVMs within its own edge network rather than through an external hosted execution service, reporting median warm invocation times of roughly 5–6 milliseconds versus 25–40 milliseconds previously, improved p99 performance, 99.998% availability, and faster log delivery. Requests are routed from nearby edge nodes to compute nodes using service specifications and rendezvous hashing, which preserves warm caches while allowing heavily used services to spread across multiple nodes to prevent hotspots. Each deployment runs in isolated MicroVMs with separate runtime, platform, and function images, while image caching, lightweight Linux booting, memory-mapped files, VM snapshots, local DNS resolvers, metrics, and circuit breakers are intended to reduce latency and improve resilience. The new platform retains existing Edge Functions development workflows and requires no customer migration or pricing change, while potentially enabling broader npm package support, reconsideration of prior CPU, memory, and code-size limits, and future features that rely on Netlify controlling the full network path.

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