SwiftNic
A Layer-2 cloud NIC for immutable SwiftBoot workloads — bitwise control of IP headers, and a public-IP presence for your on-prem app through an ephemeral cloud twin.
Layer 2
Data-link access to the frame
Bitwise
IP-header control, where hardware allows
Public IP
On-prem app, cloud presence
Cloud networking hides the wire.
A standard cloud NIC hands you an IP and a firewall, not the packet. You cannot touch the Layer-2 frame or rewrite an IP header, so anything that needs control of the wire — custom routing, encapsulation, header-level traffic shaping — is off the table.
And giving a local or on-prem containerised app a real public presence means standing up gateway infrastructure with its own mutable lifecycle and attack surface, separate from the app it serves.
The packet, not just the socket.
01
Layer-2 access
SwiftNic operates at the data-link layer with full, bitwise control of IP headers — the frame, not just the socket — wherever the hyperscaler’s network hardware exposes it.
02
A cloud twin with a public IP
An immutable, distroless SwiftBoot micro-VM launches in the cloud paired to your OCI app, provisions a virtual cloud NIC with a public IP, and carries traffic between your payload and the global network.
03
Ephemeral by design
When the app stops, the NIC is de-provisioned and the twin terminates. Nothing mutable is left running between sessions.
Design, honestly labelled.
| Milestone | Status | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| L2 NIC + bitwise IP-header control | In progress | Where hyperscaler hardware supports it |
| Cloud twin + public-IP provisioning | In progress | Design |
| Ephemeral de-provisioning | Next | — |
| Hyperscaler hardware coverage | Next | — |
Figures on this page are targets and internal measurements at proof-of-concept stage. We share the methodology with anyone who wants to run it.
Prove it on real hardware.
The near-term work proves bitwise header control on a hyperscaler that exposes it at the NIC, and the cloud-twin lifecycle end to end — provision, carry, de-provision — on an immutable SwiftBoot image.
SwiftNic spins out of Research ByIQ once the Layer-2 control holds on real hyperscaler hardware.