kiri: 2.5ms container startup, 80x faster than Docker Desktop

Kiri, written in Rust, is a lightweight container runtime that runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. As an alternative to Docker Desktop and OrbStack, it fully supports the docker CLI, Compose, and buildx commands you already use. By maintaining compatibility with existing tools through the Docker Engine API, it reduces container startup and shutdown times to approximately 2.5ms.

Unlike conventional approaches, it does not use runc, shim, or dockerd. A custom 10MB kernel and a Rust agent of approximately 900KB in size directly create containers using the clone3 system call. Thanks to this architecture, daemon memory usage is only about 15MB, and if the VM remains idle for 60 seconds, it enters sleep mode and wakes up in 0.15 seconds.

You can set up a Kubernetes cluster or create a Linux machine with a single command. It supports local domains (http://<name>.kiri.local) and self-signed CA-based HTTPS, and on macOS, it can run amd64 images via Rosetta. The UI and settings support 38 languages, with full support for RTL languages such as Arabic and Persian.

It is suitable for developers feeling the overhead of Docker Desktop or teams where local development environment boot speed is critical. It provides an import command to pull images from OrbStack or Docker Desktop, making the migration process easy. It is released under the Apache-2.0 license and is available on macOS 14 and later, Windows 10/11, and major Linux distributions.