I’ve been reading a lot about the benefits of virtualization and cloud deployment. And how to integrate these systems with modern web client design. It was all very exciting. So now I’m pleased to announce flak is fully cloud enabled. Here’s the story of my incredible journey.

The first thing we need is a virtual machine. I’m using copy/v86 for this. It’s a machine emulator written in javascript, so it’s web ready from the start.

Next we need a cloud of virtual machines. Preferably the cloud should autoscale in response to traffic levels. To achieve this, I create a new virtual machine for every visitor. This guarantees great performance. It’s also very secure. Everybody has their own virtual machine, so it’s not possible for an attacker to alter the post you’re currently reading.

However, I’m not willing to stop at good enough. We can do better than that. We can create a virtual machine for every post as well. You’ve heard about containers and isolation, right? Every flak post now runs in its own container, isolating it from other posts.

To improve performance, I’ve distributed the virtual machine cloud across the internet by leveraging the powerful javascript engine of each browser. Your personal virtual machine is ideally located in close proximity to you, improving interactive response time.

It’s time for some real talk about the costs of running this infrastructure. Just kidding, there are no costs. All these machines are entirely virtual. I don’t have to pay even a penny to run them.

Modern web design is all about rich interactive experiences. What can I do to make things responsive without slow and tiresome server requests? That’s another great thing about this new architecture. By running the virtual machine in your browser, there are no server requests. Everything you need to view each post is fully loaded and contained within the VM. You can read and scroll at your own pace, and enjoy immediate feedback.

As a reader, I’m sure you’re very excited about these changes, but this is only the beginning. I hope to further expand and enrich the client side experience over time. It’s only going to get better.