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Arker runs hyper-elastic, durable virtual machines for agents at extreme scale, redesigned at every layer to maximize agent performance per dollar. Every machine is a fork of a source VM you choose, either your own or one of Arker’s public VMs. Connect your Arker organization with a custom pool.

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Why Arker

  • Faithful forks. Each machine forks the source VM’s full state, disk and memory included, so it starts with your tools installed and your services already running.
  • Hyper-elastic. Arker’s custom hypervisor spins machines up, down, and resizes them in milliseconds.
  • Durable, always on. Arker transparently snapshots machines and restores them on another host if one fails, backed by a 99.9% uptime SLA.
  • Sleep with your state intact. With sleep on, Arker suspends idle machines and restores their memory, files, and running processes in milliseconds, even after hours unused.
  • Run next to your data. Place machines on AWS, Google Cloud, or Arker’s own bare metal, in the same data centers where your backend and data live.

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Set up an Arker pool

1

Create an API key

In the Arker console, create an API key. Store the key as an org-owned secret in Omnara.
2

Choose or build a source VM

Arker’s public ubuntu-base VM works as is. To add your own tools, fork it into a named VM in the region your pool will use, install what you need, and use that name as the source. With the Arker CLI:
  • Omnara sets each machine’s CPU and memory to the requested size. The disk keeps the source VM’s size.
  • Don’t use a VM that has run the Omnara daemon as the source, such as a machine from an Omnara pool. Machines created from it keep the old machine’s identity and credentials and never come online.
3

Create the pool

On the Machines page, click New pool and choose Arker. Enter the credential, source VM, region, CPU and memory, and capacity limits.Only environment variables whose names use letters, digits, and underscores, and don’t start with a digit, reach the startup script.To use the API instead, call Create a pool with the fields under API fields. The dashboard can’t turn on sleep yet, so set sleep_after_ms through the API.

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API fields

When you create a pool through the API, send these fields in the Create a pool request. provider_config applies to the whole pool, and default_machine_provider_options sets the options for each new machine, which project grants and agent configs can override. For example:
  • source is the name of a VM in your Arker organization, or a public VM such as ubuntu-base. It must exist in the pool’s region.
  • region is where machines run, written as it appears in the Arker API endpoint, such as aws-us-west-2 or arker-eu. See Arker’s regions.
  • Keep the maximums within the source VM’s limits. ubuntu-base allows up to 4 vCPU and 5120 MB of memory.
  • sleep_after_ms turns on sleep. Omit it to keep machines awake.
  • Optional: startup_script in default_machine_provider_options runs on each new machine before the daemon starts. In provider_config, allowed_sources and allowed_regions are allowlists, and api_base_url replaces the region’s API endpoint, such as for a private Arker region.