Navaris: Sandbox Control Plane

2026-05-14 · source · source ↗ · raw capture · wiki page

Purpose

Unified control plane abstracting sandbox management across multiple isolation backends -- Incus (system containers) and Firecracker (microVMs) -- offering a single REST API and CLI regardless of the underlying runtime.

Key Problem

"Running untrusted or experimental code safely requires strong isolation -- but the tooling to manage that isolation is fragmented."

Core Capabilities

Multi-backend support (Incus containers and Firecracker microVMs)
Full lifecycle management (create, start, stop, destroy)
Runtime resource resizing via PATCH endpoint
Time-bounded CPU/memory boost with auto-revert
Snapshot and restore functionality
Copy-on-write cloning on btrfs/XFS/bcachefs
Memory CoW fork for Firecracker
Interactive persistent shell sessions
Command execution with PTY support
Port forwarding
WebSocket event streaming
OpenTelemetry metrics and tracing
Project-based sandbox organization
MCP server integration for AI agents

Backend Comparison

Incus (Containers): ~1s startup, minimal overhead, namespace/cgroup isolation. Best for dev environments, CI runners, trusted workloads.

Firecracker (MicroVMs): 2-3s startup, ~30MB overhead, hardware (KVM) isolation. Best for untrusted code, multi-tenant environments.

Architecture

CLI client, daemon (navarisd), SQLite persistence, async operation dispatcher, OpenTelemetry observability. Lightweight guest agent (navaris-agent) in Firecracker VMs communicating over vsock.

Technology

Go (78.6%), TypeScript (17.1%). Docker image with both backends bundled. Apache License 2.0.