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Welcome to Herd: The Application Delivery Plane

Herd is a high-performance Application Delivery Plane designed to bridge the gap between low-level microVM hardware and the modern application developer experience.

Built on Firecracker, Herd automates the process of translating standard Docker/OCI images into isolated, session-affine compute environments, complete with built-in L7 ingress and zero-config networking.

⚡ The Four Delivery Layers

Herd's architecture is built on four critical operational layers that guarantee speed, security, and ease of use:

  1. OCI Translation: Pulls images via containerd, extracts execution metadata (CMD, ENV), and automatically provisions Copy-on-Write rootfs snapshots.
  2. L7 "Wake-on-Request" Proxy: A high-speed reverse proxy that intercepts HTTP requests, cold-boots the corresponding microVM in sub-500ms (if needed), and tunnels traffic securely into the guest.
  3. Automated IPAM: A zero-config networking engine that manages PTP TAP interfaces, deterministic internal IP allocation, and host-side NAT routing.
  4. Guest Agent Execution: Injects a meticulously crafted, static herd-guest-agent as PID 1, which bootstraps internal microVM networking and manages the user workload execution.

Get started with Herd today: