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 unikernels, making them fast, secure, and truly serverless.

Why Run Remote IDEs on Unikraft Cloud?

⚡ Instant Developer Environments

Unikraft unikernels 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 unikernel 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

Unikernels 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 application 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 kraft CLI tool and a container runtime engine, e.g. Docker.

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

Code
 
git clone https://github.com/kraftcloud/examples
cd examples/code-server/

Make sure to log into Unikraft Cloud by setting your token and a metro close to you. We use fra0 (Frankfurt, 🇩🇪) in this guide:

Code
 
# Set Unikraft Cloud access token
export UKC_TOKEN=token
# Set metro to Frankfurt, DE
export UKC_METRO=fra0

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

Code
 
kraft cloud volume create \
    --name code-workspace \
    --size 1Gi

kraft cloud deploy \
    --scale-to-zero on \
    --scale-to-zero-stateful \
    --scale-to-zero-cooldown 4s \
    -M 2048 \
    --name code-server \
    -p 443:8443 \
    -v code-workspace:/workspace \
    -e PGUID=0 \
    -e PGID=0 \
    -e PASSWORD=unikraft \
    -e SUDO_PASSWORD=unikraft \
    -e DEFAULT_WORKSPACE="/workspace" \
    .

Now, you can access the Code Server in the browser, at the provided URL.

Volume

This deployment creates a volume for data persistence: code-workspace. Upon deleting the instance (e.g., kraft cloud instance rm code-server), this volume will persist, allowing you to create another instance without losing data. To remove the volume, you can use:

Code
 
kraft cloud volume rm code-workspace