A deep dive into Vercel’s build infrastructure

Introduced Hive, a new low-level untrusted and ephemeral compute platform for Vercel's builds. Hive is architected for multi-tenancy, security, reliability, performance, and cost-effectiveness. Key components include Hive (cluster), Box (bare metal machines running VMs), Cell (microVMs using Firecracker), Control Plane (orchestration), and API. Optimizations include Docker image caching and block device snapshotting for faster VM startup. The platform reduced provisioning times for Secure Compute from 90 seconds to 5 seconds and improved overall build performance by 30%.