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Kern Ships a 1.52 MB Container Runtime That Starts in 3.5ms and Serves Agents Over MCP
Kern, on the HN front page Aug 24 with 63 points, is an Apache-2.0 rootless sandbox and resource runtime in a single 1.52 MB static binary with no daemon, claiming ~3.5 ms container start against Docker's ~297 ms and zero resident memory when idle. It reads OCI images and docker-compose files but deliberately skips Docker's API, overlay networks and Swarm, and ships Python and Node bindings plus an MCP server so Claude Desktop and other agents can drive it directly. The stated primary use case is untrusted and AI-generated code, which is the workload the paid sandbox vendors are currently pricing per hour.
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