Founder letter · July 2026

Ilse put Beacon in your browser

Hi,

The console got faster and clearer in two places this month, and checkpoint restores on Functions went from minutes to seconds. Ilse Marchetti, our CTO, also ported Beacon to the browser. And I started a hardware kit for learning cluster networking from the wire up.

Two of these make the platform quicker to work with, and two are about seeing how a system behaves instead of reading about it. I like that mix. Let’s get into it.

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Live logs render in about a second

The live logs view for Functions deployments used to take five seconds or more to load. Priya Nandakumar’s backend rewrite brings that to about one. If you gave up on it before, give it another go.

Open the console →

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Checkpoint restores are roughly 26x faster

We overhauled snapshot storage, and the p99 time to restore a warmed vLLM replica from a checkpoint fell from four minutes to nine seconds.

Read the checkpointing docs →

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Usage and limits got a refresh

A new Overview summarises spend at a glance, with toggles for billing cycle and calendar month. A Limits page lists the resource caps on your plan and links to upgrade. And a per-deployment breakdown shows where spikes come from.

Check your usage →

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Beacon in the browser

Ilse Marchetti built beaconlite, a TypeScript port of a subset of the Beacon global router that runs client-side with no backend. It lets routing decisions and failover be simulated inside interactive technical essays. It is early, and you can try it today.

Try the simulator →

A deep navy tile with diagonal lime stripes and a ring holding a network cable glyph

The little rack

A reproducible hardware kit, built around four Raspberry Pis and a managed switch, for learning how a cluster schedules work by watching the invisible layers directly. The repo is live with a full bill of materials and prebuilt Pi OS images. My first write-up asks: two Pis connected by one Ethernet cable can surely already talk to each other, right?

Build your own little rack →

beaconlite and the little rack are both early projects, and reader replies shape where they go next. Reply to this email and I’ll get back to you, or pass you on to Ilse. I’m listening, about these projects or anything else on your mind.

~ Mara at Lumenrack

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