Episode 54 of the Nextflow Podcast is here! 
This week I sat down with @lorenzo, an engineer at Seqera with an incredible background in Linux kernel internals. Lorenzo is the co-author of O’Reilly’s “Linux Observability with eBPF” and one of the key developers behind Fusion and Fusion Snapshots.
We go deep on how Fusion Snapshots actually work under the hood. It’s a deep dive and trust me, it’s fascinating.
Lorenzo’s Journey:
- From Linux observability and security to bioinformatics infrastructure
- Maintaining Falco (CNCF graduated project) and finding kernel bugs
- Writing kubectl-trace for eBPF in Kubernetes
- Why Seqera’s mission resonated personally
Understanding Fusion:
- Fusion - FUSE filesystem purpose-built for Nextflow pipelines
- Why it’s different from AWS Mountpoint and generic solutions
- Deep optimization for bioinformatics tools (even the weird ones!)
- Shipped via Wave, bound to container lifecycle
The Magic of Fusion Snapshots:
- Freeze running tasks and migrate them across cloud instances
- Leverages CRIU (Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace)
- Captures complete state: memory, file descriptors, network connections
- Works within the 2-minute spot reclamation window
- Incremental dumps for tasks using huge amounts of memory
Open Source Contributions:
- criu-static - Statically linked CRIU binaries
- staticreg - Web interface for OCI registries
- Patches contributed back to the CRIU project
The Full Stack Advantage:
- Platform → Wave → Fusion → Nextflow
- “Machined” to fit together like Apple hardware/software
- A checkbox in the UI triggers kernel-level optimizations
Try it yourself:
- Sign up for Seqera Platform (includes $100 free compute credits!)
- Create a compute environment with Fusion Snapshots enabled
- Run your pipelines on spot instances
- Share your feedback in platform on the forum and tag @lorenzo!
Lorenzo specifically asked for community feedback, even bug reports make him happy!
“I look at the tickets just for the Fusion Snapshot bugs, and when they are not there, I’m a bit sad.”
Show notes, transcript, links and more: https://seqera.io/podcasts/episode-54-fusion-snapshots/
The episode is available now on YouTube, Spotify, and all other podcast platforms! 
The podcast page has a detailed summary plus full transcript for easy reading.
What do you think of Fusion Snapshots? Have you tried them? Let us know below! 
