Alternatives
Products that do what Cygnus – A fast, lightweight self-hostable serverless runtime and PaaS does
I built Cygnus because of a long standing frustration with the compromises needed to be made when choosing a deployment option for web applications. The ecosystem is fragmented into a few distinct camps, each sacrificing user experience or runtime compatibility to balance isolation, startup latency, and their own profit margins. Docker: Heavier and slower because it has to supervise more than web apps. Paying overhead you don't need. MicroVM's: Good isolation, but huge maintenance surface area and substantial overhead. Great for untrusted code, overkill for your own apps. Workerd: Tries to…
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2020 · github.com
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2017 · hasura.io
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2015 · github.com
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2015 · medium.com
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2016 · portainer.io
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2017 · github.com
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2014 · ibuildthecloud.com
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Over the past few months, as we scaled our internal AI Agents, we hit a dead end: Running LLM-generated arbitrary code in Docker is basically running naked on security due to container escape risks. But using full traditional VMs takes minutes to boot and eats too much memory to support high-density concurrency. We loved the developer experience of SaaS sandboxes on the market, but they are closed-source, expensive, and have too high a barrier to entry for self-hosting. So, our team decided to build our own. After months of grinding, using RustVMM and KVM, we built a blazing-fast,…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 12LV
Hello HN! We've been working on a new hypervisor https://kwarantine.xyz that can run strongly isolated containers. This is still a WIP, but we wanted to give the community an idea about our approach, its benefits, and various use cases it unlocks. Today, VMs are used to host containers, and make up for the lack of strong security as well as kernel isolation in containers. This work adds this missing security piece in containers. We plan on launching a free private beta soon. Meanwhile, we'd deeply appreciate any feedback, and happy to answer any questions here or on our slack…
2021
- 13MI
2017 · marina.io
- 14IB
I got sick of: - Re-writing the same Terraform for the same common AWS infrastructure - Re-writing the same Rails code to build the same webapp - Re-configuring the same monitoring systems & CI/CD pipelines - Spending a week in dependency & configuration hell wiring it all together When I was launching my first two startups, I wished I had a strong starting point with all of the best practices & technology configured out-of-the-box. Every tool I found wanted to lock me in to some PaaS provider (that might not even exist in a year) who wanted to take a premium on my infrastructure spend…
2024
- 15RC
Hi HN, this is Cesar and Rodny, developers of an open-source container runtime called Sysbox, and co-founders of a startup called Nestybox (YC S20). We launched on HN almost a year ago and got excellent feedback then (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24084758). Happy to say that over the past year, Sysbox has continued to gain traction, particularly for securing containers in production, CI/CD, and containerized dev environments. We wanted to announce an important new feature: integration between Sysbox and Kubernetes. As a quick refresher, Sysbox is a "runc" that…
2021
- 16F0
2020 · github.com
- 17SM
Hi HN! I've posted this a few weeks back without much HN traction - today we've added a free community tier, so anyone can try it out. TL;DR: We’ve launched StableBuild, a new tool to easily freeze and pin Docker images, operating system packages, Python packages, and arbitrary build dependencies; in 5 lines of code: https://stablebuild.com . As the CTO at an ML startup w/ 75 people (https://edgeimpulse.com/) I’ve grown incredibly frustrated with non-deterministic builds. Last year basically every week one of our containers (we have 40+ unique ones in prod)…
2024 · stablebuild.com
- 18SD
2014 · andrewtorkbaker.com
- 19NA
Hi, over the past few months I've been working on this project: Numax is a small Rust runtime that does three things: it runs WebAssembly modules in a sandbox, has a built-in local key-value store, and syncs everything across nodes with CRDTs and gossip. Basically, you write a wasm module, run it on two machines, and they converge (I hope !). It's a decentralized system... I hope someone finds it interesting! There's a whitepaper I've put a lot into, and I think the code isn't bad either! I believe there's still room in this world for software that's fun and well made, and while building…
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 20ID
Frustrated by the complexity and resource drain of multi service monitoring stacks, I built Simon. I wanted a single, lightweight dashboard to replace the heavy stack and the constant need for an SSH client for routine tasks. The result is a resource efficient dashboard in a single Rust binary, just a couple of megabytes in size. Its support for various architectures on Linux also makes it ideal for embedded systems and lightweight SBCs. It integrates: Comprehensive Monitoring: Realtime and historical metrics for the host system and Docker containers (CPU, memory, disk usage, and network…
Nov 2025 · github.com
- 21NA
2020 · github.com
- 22VS
I’ve been building Volant, a modular microVM orchestration engine that makes running microVMs feel as simple as Docker. It supports cloud-init, GPU/VFIO passthrough (yes, you can run AI/ML workloads in isolated microVMs), booting Docker images via a plugin system, and Kubernetes-style deployments with replication, all from a single CLI(soon to be web UI, see next) Coming soon: a built-in PaaS mode with snapshot-based cold start elimination, sort of like Dokploy, but designed for serverless workloads that boot from memory snapshots instead of containers. Volant is intentionally a…
Oct 2025 · github.com
- 23GF
I've been a big fan of fly.io with it’s devx, but cold starts and pricing have been a consistent problem. Even for side projects it's painful if they take 30s to load, it just kills the whole experience. With coding agents becoming good, there were a lot more things I started building, and I just wanted to run all of those things! GCI was built to solve this. It’s just a CLI, just uses ssh to interact with your target machine, and relies on docker swarm to get your services running (docker swarm is IMO underrated, providing benefits even with a single node). It can deploy on any machine that…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 24MF
2021 · github.com
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