AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Katakate – Dozens of VMs per node for safe code exec
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
Katakate runs dozens of lightweight virtual machines per node for safe execution of untrusted code at scale. It targets AI engineers and DevOps teams needing to run AI-generated code, CI/CD pipelines, or off-chain AI… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
We just open-sourced Lume - a tool we built after hitting walls with existing virtualization options on Apple Silicon. No GUI, no complex stacks - just a single binary that lets you spin up macOS or Linux VMs via CLI or API. Why we built Lume: - Run native macOS VMs in 1 command, using Apple Virtualization.Framework: `lume run macos-sequoia-vanilla:latest` - Prebuilt images on https://ghcr.io/trycua (macOS, Ubuntu on ARM) - API server to manage VMs programmatically `POST /lume/vms` - A python SDK on github.com/trycua/pylume Run prebuilt macOS images in just…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
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 →
- 3
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 →
- 4
"interesting" VM in C. Let's see how this goes. Contribute to tekknolagi/carp development by creating an account on GitHub.
2014 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
CTO.ai 2.0▲204A smarter workflow for Kubernetes & Cloud Native apps
2021 · cto.ai · its alternatives →
- 6
Hey HN, Lume is an open-source CLI for running macOS and Linux VMs on Apple Silicon. Since launch (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42908061), we've been using it to run AI agents in isolated macOS environments. We needed VMs that could set themselves up, so we built that. Here's what's new in 0.2: *Unattended Setup* – Go from IPSW to a fully configured VM without touching the keyboard. We built a VNC + OCR system that clicks through macOS Setup Assistant automatically. No more manual setup before pushing to a registry: lume create my-vm --os macos --ipsw latest…
Jan 2026 · cua.ai · its alternatives →
- 7
YepCode▲157Hey HN, We’re excited to introduce YepCode Run, a serverless runtime and SDK for executing code in secure sandboxes. Built on top of YepCode (https://yepcode.io), it allows you to execute code without any setup or installation. Perfect for: * Running AI-generated code – Securely in a sandbox environment, enabling fully autonomous AI agents. * Package Exploration – Try npm or PyPI packages without installing them locally. * Code Sharing – Easily share runnable code examples with others. * Quick Prototyping – Test snippets and algorithms on the fly. Just write or paste your code, and…
2022 · yepcode.io · its alternatives →
- 8
Spin up secure sandboxes in ~100 ms
Nov 2025 · hopx.ai · its alternatives →
- 9RL
Hello Hacker News! We're Yangqing, Xiang and JJ from lepton.ai. We are building a platform to run any AI models as easy as writing local code, and to get your favorite models in minutes. It's like container for AI, but without the hassle of actually building a docker image. We built and contributed to some of the world's most popular AI software - PyTorch 1.0, ONNX, Caffe, etcd, Kubernetes, etc. We also managed hundreds of thousands of computers in our previous jobs. And we found that the AI software stack is usually unnecessarily complex - and we want to change that. Imagine if you are a…
2023 · lepton.ai · its alternatives →
- 10
Velane▲95n8n is built for humans dragging nodes on a canvas. That breaks down at B2B scale (embedding in a product, multi-tenant scalability, etc). n8n does have an MCP server so agents can create workflows too, but it outputs raw JSON. That's fine for n8n's engine, but painful for a coding agent (or a human reviewing its output) to read, write, diff, or debug. I'm building an alternative where workflows are authored by a coding agent in [a more dev-legible format] instead of JSON blobs, and execute it at scale.
Jul 2026 · velane.sh · its alternatives →
- 11
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 →
- 12
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 · its alternatives →
- 13
Create microVMs from OCI images. Contribute to slp/krunvm development by creating an account on GitHub.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14LV
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 · its alternatives →
- 15WL
Hi HN — I am the CTO of Rierino (https://rierino.com/platform/core), a low-code backend platform built for developers, not business users. We recently launched our Developer Lite version on AWS Marketplace, and we're offering a free private trial to HN users. We built our low-code platform while working with scale-ups, out of frustration with how painful and expensive backend logic can be to implement and maintain in high-speed, distributed environments. It either meant hand-coding everything or relying on rigid tools that abstract away too much. We tested a range of LCNC…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 16
Virtink is a Kubernetes add-on for running Cloud Hypervisor virtual machines. By using Cloud Hypervisor as the underlying hypervisor, Virtink enables a lightweight and secure way to run fully virtualized workloads in a canonical Kubernetes cluster.
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17IS
Hey HN! For that last 8 months I've been trying to make agents that can hack web applications to find vulnerabilities in them - An AI Security Tester. The system has 29 agents in total, a custom LLM Orchestration framework which works on the task-subtask architecture (old-school but works amazingly for my use case, and is pretty reliable) with custom agent calling mechanism. No Auo-Gen, Langchain and Crew AI - Everything custom built for pentesting. Each test runs in an isolated Kali linux environment (on AWS Fargate), where the agents have full access to the environment to undertake any…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 18
We are the developers of Phoenix, which we released in April of this year with a goal of bringing LLM observability to the notebook. In the time since, the growth of LLM frameworks and complex agent workflows led us to add support for LLM spans and traces and introduce a simple Eval harness for testing the data from those spans. The latest Traces & Spans release of Phoenix offers: -Out of the box tracing for LlamaIndex and LangChain -Fully local execution, no data sent anywhere, outside of your own LLM calls -Ability to get a common dataframe format across frameworks back to a notebook for…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
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 →
- 20
Since I mostly work within the terminal, I wanted an AI coding assistant that integrates seamlessly with it. Something I could call from SSH, integrate into scripts or just invoke quickly without leaving the shell. Most existing tools (at the time) were either closed, required various dependencies, or tied to a specific vendor. I wanted a free, open-source alternative that: - installs with a single binary (useful on bare servers) - talks to any LLM endpoint and especially self-hosted open weight model - could run headless, composable, and Unix-like SHAI stands for SHell AI! Along the way I…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
I think agents should work like real teams, with independent, distinct roles, async communication, and the ability to onboard new teammates or tools without restructuring the whole org. I built backend systems at Yahoo and TikTok so event-driven agents felt obvious. But no agent SDKs were using this pattern, so I made Calfkit. Calfkit breaks down agents into independent services (LLM inference, tools, and routing) that communicate asynchronously through Kafka. Agents, tool services, and downstream consumers can be deployed, added-to, removed, and scaled independently. Check it out if this…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Democratisation of local AI is key. I've been working on pushing the limits of commercial hardware, squeezing any extra bit possible. My Scientific Agentic AI hareness helped me to reallocate every single bit of it. I rewrote the Kernel, I went down the CUDA rabbit hole until I have been able to explain any bit and any ms of computational power involved in the process pushing the Qwen 30B-A3B from 8 tok7s to 19 tok/s with llama.cpp up to 22.2 tok/s with my project and 109 tok/s on not novel content and speeding up the prefill by 5-9X
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
A fast, hackable and simple x64 VT-x hypervisor for Windows and Linux. Builtin userspace sandbox and introspection engine. - asamy/ksm
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24KI
Hey HN, As an AppSec engineer, I’ve spent a lot of time running and tunning open-source security scanners like Trivy, Semgrep, Gitleaks and Dojo. What I have found is that running them is easy, reviewing the results, not so much. Each tool outputs different JSON, false positives pile up, and CI either becomes noisy or blocks everything. So I built Kekkai (formerly Hokage), a small open-source CLI that wraps these scanners and focuses specifically on human triage. Kekkai runs the scanners in isolated Docker containers, normalizes their outputs into a single format, and provides an interactive…
Feb 2026 · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Lume – OS lightweight CLI for MacOS and Linux VMs on Apple Silicon alternatives
- Sub-millisecond VM sandboxes using CoW memory forking alternatives
- Lightweight tool for managing Linux virtual machines alternatives
- A small virtual machine written in C alternatives
- CTO.ai 2.0 alternatives
- Lume 0.2 – Build and Run macOS VMs with unattended setup 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 →