Popcorn boots your immutable OCI container as a standalone OS — in under 1 second — across cloud and bare metal.
Traditional OS containers run atop mutable hosts, slow to boot and vulnerable to noisy neighbors and attack surfaces. Popcorn changes that: it turns your OCI app into the OS, fusing a minimal kernel with your container into a single bootable binary.
| Cloud | Platform | Boot Time | Boot Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS | Nitro | ~450ms | EFI |
| Azure | Hyper-V Gen2 | ~800ms | EFI |
| GCP | KVM | ~500ms | EFI |
| QEMU | Local | ~300ms | BIOS |
| App | Description | Boot Time | Cloud Ready |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nginx | Static site in under 500ms | ~400ms | ✅ |
| PostgreSQL | Ephemeral dev database | ~450ms | ✅ |
| Redis | In-memory microservice | ~420ms | ✅ |
| Alpine + Bash | Debug shell image | ~350ms | ✅ |
| Feature | Popcorn | Chainguard | Bottlerocket | Vanilla OCI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bootable image (no host OS) | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ |
| Millisecond cloud boot | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Verified kernel lifecycle CI | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Immutable + reproducible | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
| Zero-runtime attack surface | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Cloud-native GitHub pipeline | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
# Build and publish for AWS Nitro
./scripts/build/kernels.sh aws-nitro
./scripts/publish/aws/to-aws.sh my-popcorn-imageSupports --reference object stores, multi-arch builds, and isolated CI runners with pinned kernel tags.
With SwiftBoot, dependencies are managed exactly where they belong: in the pipeline. Not the target, not the user’s system, and never via ad hoc scripts or runtime surprises.
SwiftBoot turns your pipeline into your release gate, your compliance tool, and your last line of defense. The host? It just boots.
Popcorn™ and Kata both offer hardened isolation — but that’s where the similarity ends. Scroll to explore why Popcorn’s zero-runtime boot model is in a class of its own.
Popcorn boots your workload — not a container inside a VM.
It’s smaller, faster, and simpler than Kata. No runtime. No drift. No excuses.
If your team wants serverless speed with VM-grade security and container simplicity — Popcorn pops.