Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Holos – QEMU/KVM with a compose-style YAML, GPUs and health checks
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…
Holos is a QEMU/KVM runtime for managing single-host VM stacks using YAML configuration similar to Docker Compose. It simplifies VM management by eliminating libvirt XML complexity and includes GPU passthrough support… 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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Hi HN! I’m excited to share Holos, a Go command line tool we wrote to fill the configuration management gap in Kubernetes. Holos uses CUE to configure software distributed with Helm and Kustomize using a well defined, type safe language eliminating the need to template YAML. You probably know (or are) someone who has suffered with the complexity of plain text YAML templates and merging multiple values.yaml files together to configure software running in Kubernetes. We built Holos so we don’t have to template YAML but we can still integrate software distributed with Helm and Kustomize…
2024 · holos.run · its alternatives →
- 2
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 →
- 3WM
Try it out! https://glhf.chat/ Hey HN! We’ve been working for the past few months on a website to let you easily run (almost) any open-source LLM on autoscaling GPU clusters. It’s free for now while we figure out how to price it, but we expect to be cheaper than most GPU offerings since we can run the models multi-tenant. Unlike Together AI, Fireworks, etc, we’ll run any model that the open-source vLLM project supports: we don’t have a hardcoded list. If you want a specific model or finetune, you don’t have to ask us for it: you can just paste the Hugging Face link in and…
2024 · glhf.chat · its alternatives →
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HVM1 (2022): a massively parallel, optimal functional runtime in Rust - HigherOrderCO/HVM1
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
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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I've long wanted to harness QEMU/KVM for my desktop virtual machines, but I'm befuddled by virt-manager's lack of support for working NVIDIA 3D acceleration, dogmatic embrace of ugly XML, and the puzzling UI decision of having to click what seems like 15 buttons to attach an ISO to a VM image. When I further learned that NVIDIA's broken 3D acceleration is the fault of libvirt as opposed to QEMU's virtio driver, I had an idea... Behold, vm-curator! A fast and friendly VM management TUI written in Rust. You can create, configure, organize, and manage VMs directly with QEMU. No libvert. No…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Create microVMs from OCI images. Contribute to slp/krunvm development by creating an account on GitHub.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
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2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Spin up new Windows qubes quickly, effortlessly and securely on Qubes OS - QubesOS/qvm-create-windows-qube
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10AV
Find information, resources and relevant links for liuchengxu.org. This domain may be for sale.
2017 · vim.liuchengxu.org · its alternatives →
- 11
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 →
- 12
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 →
- 13
Cerebrium▲300If you haven’t noticed, GPUs are scarce right now. The global boom in inference has demand growing faster than supply can keep up, and at Cerebrium ...
2024 · cerebrium.ai · its alternatives →
- 14
:racehorse: Extremely minimal vmm for linux written in C. Hopefully someday will spin linux-vm for you. - flouthoc/wiser
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
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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To try it out, simply build the project yourself from source, or use attached bootable ISO image of the system (in Releases on Github) and run it in QEMU. https://blog.vxn.dev/rou2exos-rusted-edition
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
SelfHostLLM▲134A simple calculator that estimates how many concurrent requests your GPU can handle for a given LLM, with shareable results.
2025 · selfhostllm.org · its alternatives →
- 19
Hey HN, we're excited to share Lumier (https://github.com/trycua/cua/tree/main/libs/lumier), an open-source tool for running macOS and Linux virtual machines in Docker containers on Apple Silicon Macs. When building virtualized environments for AI agents, we needed a reproducible way to package and distribute macOS VMs. Inspired by projects like dockur/windows (https://github.com/dockur/windows) that pioneered running Windows in Docker, we wanted to create something similar but optimized for Apple Silicon. The existing…
2025 · 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 →
- 21
I'm the main developer behind vHPC, a SLURM HPC cluster in a docker compose. As part of my job, I'm working on a software solution that needs to interact with one of the largest Italian HPC clusters (Cineca Leonardo, 270 PFLOPS). Of course developing on the production system was out of question, as it would have led to unbearably long feedback loops. I thus started looking around for existing containerised solutions, which were always lacking some key ingredient in order to suitably mock our target system (accounting, MPI, out of date software, ...). I thus decided that it was worth it to…
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Open-source agent runtime — SSH-native isolation, eBPF egress policy, Kubernetes + LXC backends, GPU passthrough, MCP-native CLI - FootprintAI/Containarium
Jan 2026 · github.com · 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
Hi HN! I’ve been running GitHub Actions workflows for a while, and when GitHub announced the new ubuntu-slim runners as a cheaper alternative to ubuntu-latest, I wanted to migrate—but figuring out which workflows are safe to switch turned out to be surprisingly tedious. You need to check for Docker usage, services, containers, step failures due to missing packages, and whether jobs rely on tools not available in the slim image. So I built gh-slimify, a GitHub CLI extension that automates all of this. It scans your repository, detects which jobs can be migrated, flags incompatible patterns,…
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Holos – Configure Kubernetes with CUE data structures instead of YAML alternatives
- Lightweight tool for managing Linux virtual machines alternatives
- We made glhf.chat – run almost any open-source LLM, including 405B alternatives
- High-order Virtual Machine (HVM) – A Parallel Functional Runtime alternatives
- Sub-millisecond VM sandboxes using CoW memory forking alternatives
- VM-curator – a TUI alternative to libvirt and virt-manager alternatives
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 →