SHIFT

Shift is a Linux-first computation mobility platform. It captures a managed workload with CRIU, packages the process and explicitly-scoped filesystem state into content-addressed, encrypted chunks, transfers only the chunks the destination is missing, and restores the workload there — committing the move only after the destination passes health validation.

The system ships as three programs: shift-agent, the privileged daemon that checkpoints, restores, and migrates workloads; shift, the local and fleet command-line client; and shift-control, an authenticated orchestration API backed by PostgreSQL. The supported target is Linux on x86_64 — other platforms exist as interfaces only and are not reported as supported. The project is in active development and is not publicly released.

A running process is traditionally bound to the machine it started on. Moving computation between machines means reinstalling environments, reconstructing state by hand, and accepting that the work simply starts over. The computation itself has no portability.

The abstraction Shift pursues: a running computational state should be movable between machines without the user having to manually reinstall and reconstruct the environment. The user should perceive the process as having moved, not merely restarted.

Capture, don't recreate. Shift checkpoints real process and memory state rather than reproducing an environment from configuration. What moves is what was actually running.

Move only what is missing. State is carried in content-addressed, encrypted chunks, so a migration transfers the difference — and a move is committed only after the restored workload passes validation on the destination.

A Go agent architecture: shift-agent for privileged checkpoint, restore, and migration; a CLI client for local and fleet operation; and shift-control, a metadata and orchestration API with an OpenAPI contract backed by PostgreSQL. Checkpoints can be mirrored to local disk or any S3-compatible store; workload keys remain in agent state. Agents exchange encrypted chunks directly — the control plane stores metadata and authorization state only.