Alternatives
Products that do what GCI, Fly.io like deployments with any VM does
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…
- 1ST
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
- 2WR
Hi HN, I previously wore SWE/SRE hats on GCP. Later, I was on the other side, managing thousands of machines. The friction points of onboarding and operating cloud systems are personal problems to me. I’ve found it hard to keep track of all the random cloud resources floating around, especially as my team’s assets proliferated. Occasionally, there is a resource affecting an outage but no one remembers where it is. I am constantly frustrated by existing tooling. APIs can work, after you’ve navigated the byzantine documentation, but I often find myself doing ad-hoc tasks which are best…
2022 · listvms.com
- 3KD
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
Oct 2025 · github.com
- 4AD
I'd like to share a project I've been working on for the past few months. It's a distributed workflow engine written entirely in Go. Some highlights: * Tasks are executed in a Docker container * Can run stand-alone or distributed * Highly extensible * Able to enforce limits (CPU/RAM) per task * Web UI Would love the get your feedback on it, and find out if this could be useful.
2023 · github.com
- 5RT
rx is a lightweight CLI and runtime that lets you deploy any function instantly as you save it in your editor. It’s fast, simple, and takes care of setting up all your cloud infrastructure. The best dev experience with everything you need built-in: - auth - permissions - payments - secrets - storage - logs - email & SMS - and way more Related beta launch tweet: https://x.com/KhalidZoabi/status/1777673531972608249 Wanted to show it to you guys, gauge interest, and get some feedback. There's a large roadmap of upcoming stuff. Feel free to DM me on X for more information!
2024 · rx.run
- 6FA
2017 · blog.alexellis.io
- 7HO
I'm Josh, founder of Synth. We've been working on coding agent optimization with method like GEPA and MIPRO (the latter of which, I helped to originally develop), agent evaluation via methods like RLMs, and large scale deployment for training and inference. We've also worked on patterns for memory, processing live context, and managing agent actions, combining it all in a single stack called Horizons. With the release of OpenAI's Frontier and the consumer excitement around OpenClaw, we think the timing is right to release a v0. It integrates with our sdk for evaluation and optimization but…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 8LV
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
- 9OS
It uses claude code with GLM-6 model which is cheap yet powerful for most of the cases. for deployment Cloudflare Workers. It is a 2 weeks of hard work! Lemme know what you think!
Oct 2025 · github.com
- 10CB
Clink lets you use the coding agents you already pay for (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Z.ai GLM) to build → live-preview → ship apps in an isolated container. No token purchases, no extra cost for coding. Just link your existing Claude/OpenAI/Gemini account and start building and deploying instantly. Why we built this: Claude Code is our go-to for coding, but it lacked preview + deploy capabilities. We didn't want to pay Lovable again just for that. Different agents excel at different tasks - Claude Code for versatility, Codex for complex work, GLM for speed. We needed one…
Oct 2025 · clink.new
- 11IV
Hey HN, As most of you (I think?), I cannot learn something without having a project, on the side, to implement what I’ve just learned. Recode is the project that I've used to learn Go. It lets you create a development environment in your cloud provider account easily. You can think of it as a desktop version of Gitpod / Coder / GitHub Codespaces less polished and with less features but 100% free and open-source. At the time of writing, it only works with Visual Studio Code and AWS. In order to let you configure your development environments easily, I’ve chosen to use Docker with…
2022 · github.com
- 12RA
Hi HN folks, I have been building AI agents for quite some time now. The shift has gone from LLM + Tools → LLM Workflows → Agent + Tools + Memory, and now we are finally seeing true agency emerge: agents as systems composed of tools, command-line access, fine-grained system capabilities, and memory. This way of building agents is powerful, and I believe it is here to stay. But the real question is: are the systems powering these agents ready for that future? I do not think so. Using Docker for a single agent is not going to scale well, because agents need to be lightweight and fast. LLMs…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 13AR
Hi HN. I'm the founder of Phoenix Labs (ex TikTok, Applied AI) and we're open sourcing our internal tooling today which is like a toolchain / meta-harness for CLI agents useful for really scaling eng and creative work. We are a very small team who's building a very ambitious product so we had to find ways to squeeze every ounce of efficiency that we could get our hands on. Harness strengths of different models (Claude, GPTs) and CLI-harnesses (Claude Code, Codex), safe/robust browser integration to speed up UX/QA testing, teams cli to speed up security reviews and parallelize…
May 2026 · agents-cli.sh
- 14IM
Been using it for about a year now in production, but rewrote it completely in golang. My first go project so far. I wanted to have something that would make my life easier. A lot of tools nowaday kinda push you towards functional deployments and that usually doesn't work for me since I like stuff like LiveView by Phoenix and Websocket stuff in general. Old vercel deployments back when they allowed to deploy docker containers was a godsend, but since they don't offer that anymore I had to use services like fly.io(which is amazing) or heroku. However I wanted something selfhosted that I could…
2024 · deploywithjig.askh.at
- 15LL
Some time ago I built a simple app to run swarms of coding agents — I call it fleet (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256389). It's based on centralized beads with a Python orchestrator and can run any coder (Claude, agy, Codex). Recently I added a UI to manage the whole agent lifecycle: adding new tasks, monitoring running ones, and a chat interface built on MCP with a centralized SQLite DB. From the UI I can spawn agents to run in any directory, define dependencies on other tasks, and specify which coder/model should do the job. Today I can run 10–15 agents…
Jun 2026
- 16WB
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
- 17JC
2016 · codeship.com
- 18IB
Hi HN, I’m the creator of Cordum. I’ve been working in DevOps and infrastructure for years (currently in the fintech/security space), and as I started playing with AI agents, I noticed a scary pattern. Most "safety" mechanisms rely on system prompts ("Please don't do X") or flimsy Python logic inside the agent itself. If we treat agents as autonomous employees, giving them root access and hoping they listen to instructions felt insane to me. I wanted a way to enforce hard constraints that the LLM cannot override, no matter how "jailbroken" it gets. So I built Cordum. It’s an open-source…
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 19RC
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
- 20
Hi HN, my name is Maria, and I’m a co-founder of Maritime. We started Maritime at MIT to build infrastructure for companies that need to run thousands of isolated AI agents for their customers. Imagine you set up an agent like OpenClaw, or a personal assistant agent with a custom framework, and want to give a separate version of it to every customer/friend. Each customer needs their own agent running in an isolated microVM, with persistent state, secrets, triggers, and sleep/wake behavior. Building such scalable and secure infra will take you months and will cost hundreds of…
19d ago · maritime.sh
- 21H1
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 22HS
Coding agents made everything feel fast again - except managing release binaries. Operations like these should be real commands you can run from your terminal: - "Deploy the login fix to staging" - "What's the functional difference between production and staging?" - "Notify me when any security fix hits production" - "Promote Jen's last changes to staging" - "Share the new beta API SDK with the partners at Acme" That's what Fly does. Every time a CI run pushes artifacts to the Fly Registry, it creates a release - including the binaries produced, an AI-generated summary, captured…
Apr 2026 · jfrog.com
- 23PA
Hey HN, I'm Mo. I've been building Paseo, an open source environment for running Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode across desktop, mobile, web, and CLI. It started last September as a push-to-talk voice interface for Claude Code. I wanted to talk to an agent while going on walks. Then I wanted to see what it was doing. Then text it when I couldn't talk. Then review diffs, run multiple agents, and manage work across machines. After a lot of iteration, it turned into a broader environment. The basic model is: - A daemon runs on your machine (MacBook, desktop, VPS, etc.). - Clients connect to it…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 24IV
Coding agent management is all the rage right now, and many tools are being created to fill the gap. As a power user for all tools I've used since I've started my software engineering career, I've always taken the time to test multiple tools thoroughly before deciding on one, and an agentic manager was no different. I've tested many tools, but ultimately landed on Agent of Empires (AoE for short). Why ? Because it's fast, the development is active and it's feature complete, and easy to contribute to. So I did (contribute). In my day to day workflow for my job, I need the ability to start…
May 2026 · github.com
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