Modal explains its speed moat: ImageFS tiered filesystem now tricking VM ext4
dejavucoder · x · 2026-10-17
When asked about its moat, Modal shared real technical detail: its speed comes from ImageFS, a custom lazily loaded container filesystem built on a massive tiered distributed filesystem layering local NVMe disks, regional and p2p caches, and global blob stores.
To let the newly launched VM Sandboxes benefit like gVisor containers do, Modal built a new filesystem stack that tricks a VM's ext4 driver into thinking it's talking to a normal disk.
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