Hyperlight | Blog

Upcoming Talk: Running Wasmtime in Hardware-Isolated Microenvironments

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At WasmCon, co-located with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam on March 23, Danilo (Dan) Chiarlone from Microsoft will present on running the Wasmtime WebAssembly runtime inside Hyperlight’s hardware-isolated micro-VMs. This talk will explore how combining Wasmtime with Hyperlight provides dual-layer security — a WebAssembly software sandbox inside a hypervisor-enforced VM boundary — while maintaining fast cold starts.

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Upcoming Talk: Even More Hoops — Debugging WebAssembly across the Hardware Memory Partition Boundary

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At Wasm I/O 2026 in Barcelona on March 19, Doru Blânzeanu will present on the challenges and solutions for debugging WebAssembly code running inside Hyperlight’s hardware-isolated micro-VMs. Building on Hyperlight’s GDB/LLDB debugging support, this talk will explore how to step through Wasm execution across the hardware memory partition boundary that separates the guest VM from the host.

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Upcoming Workshop: Hands-On with Hyperlight and Wasm

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At Wasm I/O 2026 in Barcelona on March 19, Lucy Menon, Ralph Squillace, and Tomasz Andrzejak will lead a hands-on workshop on building and running WebAssembly workloads inside Hyperlight’s hardware-isolated micro-VMs. This workshop will cover the practical steps of using Hyperlight Wasm — from compiling Wasm components to running them in sub-millisecond VMs with dual-layer security.

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Hyperlight Nanvix: POSIX support for Hyperlight Micro-VMs

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This post announces the integration of the Nanvix microkernel with Hyperlight, providing over 150 POSIX system calls inside hardware-isolated micro-VMs. By combining Hyperlight’s VM isolation with Nanvix’s minimal Rust-based microkernel, applications written in Python, JavaScript, C, C++, and Rust can now run with full hardware isolation and double-digit-millisecond cold starts — addressing the “serverless trilemma” of fast cold starts, secure isolation, and runtime compatibility. Written by Danilo Chiarlone and Pedro Henrique Penna.

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Re-Engineering Microsoft's Hyperlight in Rust

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

At RustConf 2025 in Seattle, Danilo Chiarlone and Ludvig Liljenberg presented on re-engineering Hyperlight in Rust. This talk covered the design decisions, challenges, and benefits of building a lightweight Virtual Machine Manager in Rust — including memory safety, no-std guest support, and how Rust’s type system helps enforce security boundaries between host and guest.

View the RustConf 2025 schedule

Hyperlight: Debugging hardware-protected guests

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This post introduces GDB and LLDB debugging support for Hyperlight micro-VM guests, enabling developers to attach a debugger at runtime and step through code executing inside a hardware-protected VM. It walks through a hands-on example using the KubeCon NA 2024 demo application, explains the technical architecture of how the GDB protocol communicates across the VM boundary, and covers supported features including breakpoints, memory/register inspection, and instruction stepping. Written by Doru Blânzeanu.

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Hyperlight Wasm: Fast, secure, and OS-free

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This post announces Hyperlight Wasm, a Hyperlight VM micro-guest that runs WebAssembly component workloads written in many programming languages via the Wasmtime runtime. By combining Hyperlight’s hardware VM isolation with Wasm’s software sandbox, it delivers dual-layer security with 1–2 ms cold starts and broad language compatibility through WASI and the Component Model. The post also covers Azure Front Door Edge Actions, powered by Hyperlight. Written by Yosh Wuyts.

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Build a Hyperlight C guest to securely execute JavaScript

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This tutorial demonstrates how to create a Hyperlight guest application in C that uses the QuickJS JavaScript engine to securely execute arbitrary JavaScript inside a hardware-protected micro-VM. It walks through building the guest using the Hyperlight C API, compiling with clang against Hyperlight’s custom libc, and creating a Rust host application that loads and calls the guest. Written by Ludvig Liljenberg.

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Hyperlight: Achieving 0.0009-second micro-VM execution time

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This post walks through the demo application from Rita Zhang’s KubeCon NA 2024 keynote, showing how Hyperlight achieves 0.0009-second average micro-VM execution time. It explores the demo app’s architecture — a Rust-based web server with cold and warm VM routes — and explains how Hyperlight creates a brand-new hardware-protected micro-VM for each request, executes a guest function, and tears it down, all within sub-millisecond timeframes. Written by Danilo Chiarlone.

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Hyperlight at KubeCon NA 2024: Keynote Demo

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

At the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024 keynote in Salt Lake City, Microsoft’s Rita Zhang demonstrated Hyperlight on stage, showing how it can execute multiple functions inside a micro virtual machine and return results in just 0.0009 seconds on average. This was one of Hyperlight’s first major public appearances and showcased the project’s sub-millisecond execution capabilities to the cloud-native community.

Watch the keynote demo

Introducing Hyperlight: Virtual machine-based security for functions at scale

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The Microsoft Azure Core Upstream team announced Hyperlight, an open-source Rust library for executing small, embedded functions using hypervisor-based protection at scale. Hyperlight creates micro-VMs in 1–2 milliseconds — about two orders of magnitude faster than traditional VMs — by eliminating the guest OS, virtual devices, and kernel boot entirely. The post covers the motivation behind Hyperlight, its architecture, and includes a Rust code walkthrough. Written by Yosh Wuyts.

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