Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Bhatti – Self-hostable Firecracker orchestrator with auto pause/wake
Bhatti spins up Linux VMs on any box with KVM — Pi 5, Hetzner AX, cloud VM with nested virt. - Each VM has its own kernel, filesystem, and IP - Idle VMs pause their CPUs and snapshot themselves to disk; the next request wakes them in 3.7ms warm or 360ms cold (p50, Hetzner AX102) - Publish any port → public URL with auto-wake on first hit - Pull any OCI/Docker image as a rootfs, or save a running sandbox as one - Multi-tenant from day one — per-user bridges, encrypted secrets, rate limits - Single Go binary, Apache 2.0 The decisions page is the most fun read on the site: vsock state…
Bhatti is a self-hosted orchestrator that runs isolated Linux VMs using Firecracker on any KVM-capable hardware, from Raspberry Pi 5 to cloud servers. Each VM has its own kernel, filesystem, and IP address. Idle VMs… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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I wanted to see how fast an isolated code sandbox could start if I never had to boot a fresh VM. So instead of launching a new microVM per execution, I boot Firecracker once with Python and numpy already loaded, then snapshot the full VM state. Every execution after that creates a new KVM VM backed by a `MAP_PRIVATE` mapping of the snapshot memory, so Linux gives me copy-on-write pages automatically. That means each sandbox starts from an already-running Python process inside a real VM, runs the code, and exits. These are real KVM VMs, not containers: separate guest kernel, separate guest…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Build and run tiny vms from Dockerfiles. Small and sleek. - ottomatica/slim
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Shuru is a lightweight sandbox that spins up Linux VMs on macOS using Apple's Virtualization.framework. Boots in about a second on Apple Silicon, and everything is ephemeral by default. There's a checkpoint system for when you do want to persist state, and sandboxes run without network access unless you explicitly allow it. Single Rust binary, no dependencies. Built it for sandboxing AI agent code execution, but it works well for anything where you need a disposable Linux environment.
Feb 2026 · shuru.run · its alternatives →
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Scalable open source pub/sub SDK with support for RPC, JWT authentication and Kubernetes — optimized for async/await
2016 · socketcluster.io · its alternatives →
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ohai! I've released Lightwhale 3, which is possibly the easiest way to self-host Docker containers. It's a free, immutable Linux system purpose-built to live-boot straight into a working Docker Engine, thereby shortcutting the need for installation, configuration, and maintenance. Its simple design makes it easy to learn, and its low memory footprint should make it especially attractive during these times of RAMageddon. If this has piqued your interest, do check it out, along with its easy-to-follow Getting Started guide. In any event, have a nice day! =)
Apr 2026 · lightwhale.asklandd.dk · its alternatives →
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hey guys. the other day i was migrating hosting providers and i just needed something not too heavy and convenient to spin up my backups for awhile and realised there is almost nothing out there. kimchi hasn't been updated for years and cockpit is heavy. so here's something i came up with in a couple hours because of a sudden urge, nothing fancy just basic creation with cloud init, lifecycle management and image/storage, but it's modern-ish and it compiles to a 8.4mb binary inclusive of the embedded web UI, CLI and API, and only dep is libvirt.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Branchable computing by using a portable, lightweight, self-contained virtual machine - smol-machines/smolvm
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Webapp.io is a DevOps platform for developers of modern webapps.
2023 · webapp.io · its alternatives →
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🪄 Spin up ready-to-code, disposable dev environments on your own servers. Self-hosted alternative to Gitpod and Github Codespaces. - hocus-dev/hocus
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! Sina here. i wanted to share this open source project (apache 2.0) that i've been working on for the past month or so. it's called hotcell and it lets you create/pause/manage sandboxes on any device (your laptop, linux vm, bare metal). i've tested it against various benchmarks that i found on computesdk (https://www.computesdk.com/benchmarks/sandboxes/) as well as the one shared by dax (cofounder of open code) on twitter recently (link to his original thread and my reply https://x.com/sinasanm/status/2078158598996443346) and…
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I've built this to make it easy to host your own infra for lightweight VMs at large scale. Intended for exec of AI-generated code, for CICD runners, or for off-chain AI DApps. Mainly to avoid Docker-in-Docker dangers and mess. Super easy to use with CLI / Python SDK, friendly to AI engs who usually don't like to mess with VM orchestration and networking too much. Defense-in-depth philosophy. Would love to get feedback (and contributors: clear & exciting roadmap!), thx
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Spin up secure sandboxes in ~100 ms
Nov 2025 · hopx.ai · its alternatives →
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- 15OF
Hello, HN community, I'm really excited to show you Open Fire a serverless CI, how does it work? relying on serverless technologies (firecracker) we can spin up a new VM in less than 200 ms running in a more powerful and newest CPU on the market, just change 1 line of code on your GitHub Actions Workflow and you're up and running! You can see our use case, where we implemented Open Fire in the NextJS repo taking down build time from 1 hour 17 minutes to 26 minutes which is a 66 % of improvement without any engineering effort! [1] The value of a CI/CD Pipeline is inversely proportional…
2023 · open-fire.dev · its alternatives →
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:racehorse: Extremely minimal vmm for linux written in C. Hopefully someday will spin linux-vm for you. - flouthoc/wiser
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
I got tired of libvirt XML and Vagrant's Ruby/reload dance for single-host VM stacks, so I built a compose-style runtime directly on QEMU/KVM. What's there: GPU passthrough as a first-class primitive (VFIO, OVMF, per-instance EFI vars), healthchecks that gate depends_on over SSH, socket-multicast L2 between VMs with no root and no bridge config, cloud-init wired through the YAML, Dockerfile support for provisioning. What it's not: Kubernetes. No clustering, no live migration, no control plane. Single host. Prototype, but I'm running it on real hardware. Curious what breaks for…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Hi HN! We’re Yann, Edouard, and Bastien from Koyeb (https://www.koyeb.com/). We’re building a platform to let you deploy full-stack apps on high-performance hardware around the world, with zero configuration. We provide a “global serverless feeling”, without the hassle of re-writing all your apps or managing k8s complexity [1]. We built Scaleway, a cloud service provider where we designed ARM servers and provided them as cloud servers. During our time there, we saw customers struggle with the same issues while trying to deploy full-stack applications and APIs resiliently. As…
2023 · koyeb.com · its alternatives →
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**PROTOTYPE** FreeBSD Jail/ZFS based implementation of the Application Container Specification - 3ofcoins/jetpack
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
I'm building Kedge, a globally distributed platform for stateful serverless apps. Here's how you make a simple static site: `echo '# Hello world!' | ssh kedge.dev` I helped build Fly.io for 4 years and shared enthusiasm for the founders' vision of a 'global Heroku'. While there, I wrote "The Serverless Server" (https://fly.io/blog/the-serverless-server/) as a study of Lambda and a sketch of a modern serverless product built around lightweight VMs. That essay was the initial inspiration for Kedge. Kedge has a fast VM orchestrator that can create code sandboxes or…
Jul 2026 · kedge.dev · its alternatives →
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2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey all! I've been using this stack personally for a while now and decided to automate it a bit by turning it into a template I can reuse. Hope others might find it helpful!
2025 · bhvr.dev · its alternatives →
- 23
Build and run tiny vms from Dockerfiles. Small and sleek. - GitHub - ottomatica/slim at 2.x
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
I've been working on CloudRouter, a skill + CLI that gives coding agents like Claude Code and Codex the ability to start cloud VMs and GPUs. When an agent writes code, it usually needs to start a dev server, run tests, open a browser to verify its work. Today that all happens on your local machine. This works fine for a single task, but the agent is sharing your computer: your ports, RAM, screen. If you run multiple agents in parallel, it gets a bit chaotic. Docker helps with isolation, but it still uses your machine's resources, and doesn't give the agent a browser, a desktop, or a GPU to…
Feb 2026 · cloudrouter.dev · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →