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Use Cases

Remote IDEs

Remote Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) have become essential for cloud-native development, collaboration, and education. But traditional setups often suffer from slow startup times, high idle costs, and complex resource management. With Unikraft Cloud, remote IDEs gain the advantages of microVMs, making them fast, secure, and truly serverless.

Why run remote IDEs on Unikraft Cloud

⚡ Instant developer environments

Unikraft microVMs boot in milliseconds, enabling instant spin-up of full-featured IDEs on demand. Developers start coding immediately without waiting for heavy VMs or containers to initialise.

🔒 Secure, isolated workspaces

Each IDE runs as a dedicated microVM instance, ensuring strong workload isolation and reducing the risk of cross-tenant data leaks. Sensitive code stays protected in a minimal, hardened environment.

💰 Cost-effective scale-to-zero

Idle IDE sessions automatically scale down to zero, eliminating wasteful spending on unused developer environments. Pay only for active usage, whether it's a classroom full of students or a globally distributed engineering team.

🌍 Seamless collaboration

Unikraft Cloud integrates with serverless backends, databases, and API gateways—so IDEs can connect effortlessly to the developer's toolchain. Perfect for pair programming, CI/CD pipelines, or education platforms.

🚀 High performance with low overhead

MicroVMs run closer to bare metal than containers, providing developers with snappy, low-latency environments that feel as fast as local coding—without sacrificing portability or scalability.

Getting started

This guide will show you how to run Visual Studio Code as a serverless app on Unikraft Cloud. The Code Server allows you to run Visual Studio Code on a remote server and access it through a web browser or a local VS Code client. When not in use, the instance will scale-to-zero and resume in milliseconds depending on usage.

To run it, follow these steps:

1. Install the CLI. Use the unikraft CLI or the legacy kraft CLI. You need a BuildKit builder. The easiest way to get one is via Docker. You can also set up and use BuildKit directly; see the quick start.

   The unikraft CLI is the current standard, while kraft is the legacy version. Choose one of the CLIs below and only run the commands associated with it for the rest of this guide.

2. Clone the examples repository and cd into the examples/visual-studio-code-server/ directory:

   Code
   git clone https://github.com/unikraft-cloud/examples
   cd examples/visual-studio-code-server/

Make sure to log into Unikraft Cloud and pick a metro close to you. This guide uses fra (Frankfurt, 🇩🇪).

The UKC_TOKEN and UKC_METRO environment variables are only supported by the legacy CLI.

When done, invoke the following command to deploy this app on Unikraft Cloud:

The output shows the instance address and other details:

This will create a volume for data persistence, and mount it at /workspace inside the VM. In this case, the instance name is code-server-6gxsp and the address is https://blue-shape-chmxf1g4.fra.unikraft.app. They're different for each run. Enter the provided address into your browser of choice to access the Code server instance.

You can list information about your instance with:

Volume

This deployment creates a volume for data persistence: code-workspace. You can list information about the volume by running:

Upon deleting the instance, this volume will persist, allowing you to create another instance without losing data. To remove the volume, you can use:

Learn more

Use the --help option for detailed information on using Unikraft Cloud:

Or visit the CLI Reference or the legacy CLI reference.