wrangle the wild web

KERNEL gives your agents and automations sandboxed chromium browsers in the cloud. each browser runs in its own vm, starts in about 30ms, and can be driven with playwright, computer controls, cdp, or webdriver bidi. around the browser, we provide what agents need on real websites: stealth and proxies, authentication, payments, browser pools, and live view, replays, and telemetry for debugging.

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why we built it this way

most browser infrastructure runs chromium in containers orchestrated by kubernetes, with warm pools to hide slow starts. we pioneered a different approach: running chromium on unikernels, single-purpose vms that carry only what the browser needs. a unikernel carries the browser and nothing else, so there’s little to boot or keep running, and that changes what the browser lifecycle costs:

• lifecycle actions are fast. a browser is created in about 30ms at p50 (performance), so you can create one per task instead of keeping a warm pool alive to hide start-up time.
• idle browsers go into standby. after five seconds with no activity, a browser enters standby: it keeps its state and stops accruing usage cost until your code or agent reconnects.
• root access is safe to hand an agent. every browser is its own vm, isolated at the hypervisor rather than sharing a host kernel with other tenants, so ssh and process execution stay contained to that session.

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open source

we value open source and transparency, so we publish the chromium image behind KERNEL browsers and the vm runtime we built to run them on github. you can read exactly what your agent’s browser runs on, run it yourself, or contribute.

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