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Vercel Build Compute Platform (Hive)

2 posts · Oct 2024 – Dec 2024

What this trail covers

Vercel's build infrastructure, powered by Hive, has been enhanced with Secure Compute integration. This integration leverages EC2 instances with custom AMIs, a Key Exchange Service, and WireGuard for encrypted traffic between Hive cells and private networks. Provisioning times for secure builds have been reduced from 90 seconds to 5 seconds, and average build performance has improved by 30%. This allows for faster and more secure builds, even for sensitive workloads, by replacing Fargate with a

All Vercel trails
  1. Optimizing secure build infrastructure with Secure ComputeThis post details the integration of Vercel's Secure Compute with its internal build compute platform, Hive. It explains the key components: EC2 instances as connectors using WireGuard for encrypted tunnels, a Key Exchange Service for managing keys and routing, and network routing via namespaces and CNI plugins. The post highlights the performance improvements achieved, reducing provisioning time from 90 seconds to 5 seconds and increasing build performance by 30% compared to the previous Fargate-based approach. It also describes the secure traffic flow and the process of starting a new Secure Compute build.
  2. A deep dive into Vercel’s build infrastructureIntroduced 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%.