vHive aims to enable serverless systems researchers to innovate across the deep and distributed software stacks of a modern serverless platform. Hence, we built vHive to be representative of the leading Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) providers, integrating the same production-grade components used by the providers, including AWS Firecracker hypervisor, Cloud Native Computing Foundation's Containerd, and Kubernetes.

vHive adopts the Knative flexible programming model, allowing the researchers to quickly deploy and experiment with any serverless applications that may comprise many functions, running in secure Firecracker microVMs, as well as serverfull services. Both the functions and the stateful services can be deployed using OCI/Docker images.

vHive empowers systems researchers to innovate on key serverless features, including functions autoscaling and cold-start delay optimization with several snapshotting mechanisms.