Roadmap

Ideas under consideration for future releases, roughly ordered by expected impact. Items graduate off this page when they ship; the CHANGELOG records what landed.

Native microVM memory snapshots

Filesystem-level checkpoint/restore now ships on BOTH backends — docker via image commit, microsandbox via disk snapshot (see Checkpoint / restore). What remains is true microVM memory snapshots on microsandbox: a restored sandbox that resumes mid-execution rather than rebooting — near-instant restore, no workload restart — still gated on upstream microsandbox support this library doesn't control the timeline for.

Portable checkpoint archives

Named checkpoints ship (see Checkpoint / restore), but they're only rediscoverable on the same machine, since the registry and the underlying artifact both live locally. Export/import (msb snapshot export/docker save and their inverses) would let a checkpoint travel between machines and CI caches — build the fixture once, ship the archive, restore it anywhere.

Module breadth

The gaps Testcontainers users will hit first: LocalStack, Elasticsearch / OpenSearch, Vault, MinIO, NATS, Cassandra, MSSQL, Oracle Free, and Ollama (LLM-in-a-box testing, which also fits the isolation story).

Framework integrations

One-annotation setup in the frameworks people actually use: Spring Boot @ServiceConnection-style wiring, Quarkus Dev Services, a pytest-style fixture story, Vitest/Jest global-setup helpers, Axum/sqlx examples.

Building images from code

Define an ad-hoc image inline in the test (Dockerfile-from-code) instead of publishing one — for testing your own service, not just its dependencies.

Host-directory mounts

Runtime file/directory copy in both directions has shipped — see Copying files. What remains is a start-time host-directory BIND alongside the existing single-file withCopyFileToContainer, for mounting a whole host directory tree into the guest before boot.

Declarative multi-service groups

A rightsize-native way to declare "these five services, this network, this startup order" as one artifact, serving the docker-compose need without the compose file format.

Warm pools

A background pool of pre-booted sandboxes so start() is near-instant — paired with reuse, this attacks time-to-first-test directly.

Fault injection

The backend controls the virtual NIC: latency, packet loss, partitions between sandboxes, kill-and-revive — first-class API instead of a separate Toxiproxy container.

Time control

A VM owns its clock: advance time inside the guest to test TTLs, certificate expiry, and cron logic faithfully — awkward to impossible on a shared kernel.

Private registry authentication

Pulling from authenticated registries, documented and tested — table stakes for enterprise evaluation.