Compute is
a brane.
A brane is the smallest schedulable thing in Omega — a manifest, an image, a capability set, and an address. The substrate spawns it, pools it, and dispatches against it. Branes don't know what host they're on, what tier they landed in, or who their neighbours are — only the events the manifest authorized.
brane
gaia · biome · habitat
standard · frontier
manifest name + ed25519
The properties
that matter.
1.2 ms
cold start (Standard P50)
Gaia + Wasmtime 37 + pooling allocator. Faster than most function calls.
125 ms
cold boot (Frontier P50)
Firecracker MicroVMs with snapshot resume. Hard isolation, fast.
6.2 K
concurrent branes/host
Standard tier, 16-core host, 64GB RAM. Pooled lifecycles.
∞
replicas per brane
Linear-scalable. Replica spread is substrate-aware (cross-AZ, cross-host).
How you
describe it.
[brane.hello] substrate = "gaia" capability = "standard" image = "omega/wasi-echo:1.0" replicas = 4
// the smallest useful manifest
What it
looks like running.
$ω compute branes
brane substrate capability replicas state
hello gaia standard 4/4 READY
fetch gaia standard 32/32 READY
session gaia frontier 12/32 RAMPING
archive habitat standard 3/3 READY
$ω compute logs hello --since 10s
Ω 13:42:01.118 hello.0 REQ /echo bytes=88 dur=2ms
Ω 13:42:01.119 hello.1 REQ /echo bytes=92 dur=2ms
Ω 13:42:01.121 hello.2 REQ /echo bytes=104 dur=3ms
brane (manifest + image + capability + ed25519)
on-demand · warm · pinned · ephemeral
two-axis: substrate + capability
per-edge bounded queue · drop or block
every spawn, every kill, every cap change
What this
surface does.
A brane is the unit of work
Not a container. Not a function. A signed manifest that the substrate spawns, addresses, and tears down. Smaller than containers; larger than functions; legible without either.
Substrate × capability
Where the brane runs (Gaia / Biome / Habitat) and how it runs (Standard / Frontier) are independent choices. Move a brane from Gaia to Habitat without touching its code.
Pooled lifecycle by default
Standard branes use the Wasmtime pooling allocator — instances are recycled in microseconds. Cold start is amortized to almost nothing for warm pools.
Every event is signed
Spawn, kill, capability change, snapshot — all signed by the substrate operator and the brane owner. Audit logs are hash-chained and immutable.