Alternatives
Products that do what Launch VM workloads securely and instantaneously, without VMs does
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…
- 1VQ
2020 · github.com
- 2WM
2021 · github.com
- 3WB
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
- 4S2
2022 · github.com
- 5HS
2016 · blog.hyper.sh
- 6VA
2014 · pypi.python.org
- 7JA
2015 · github.com
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- 10RC
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
- 11HD
Hey everyone! One of the problems I ran into is that a large part of the VM-provider ecosystem is currently paid closed-source SAAS products with varying degrees of reliability. I wanted an OSS distributed microVM orchestrator and I couldn't find one. Hyper is a distributed FirecrackerVM orchestrator written in Elixir (BEAM), with gRPC support for non-BEAM clients. Hyper is: - Distributed -- it's designed to run across a cluster of bare metal machines, and will automatically connect to other Hyper nodes. - Fast -- it builds COW layers to enable fast, localized COW forking. Cold boots happen…
Jul 2026 · github.com
- 12VS
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
- 13DO
2015 · zwischenzugs.wordpress.com
- 14FG
Built this as a guide for users of my hosting service. Everything here was run on a real instance. The Mesa/LLVM dependency is genuinely painful on a 1GB disk, and I couldn't find a way around it. WindowMaker won the window manager battle purely on dependency chain cleanliness; it pulls in no GTK, no Python, no audio stack. Happy to answer questions about any of the choices made. Screenshots at the end.
Mar 2026 · tierhive.com
- 15GF
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
- 16NA
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
- 17TS
We have built Tarit as a hypervisor built from ground up for running AI agent and RL environments. It is based on rust-vmm and can be used as a replacement for firecracker. Firecracker was built to serve a different need of primarily serverless compute and hence does not have primitives like live snapshots without pausing the VM operations. We also provide a basic orchestrator that handles placement of the microVMs, creating clusters with HA, maintaining a warm pool of VMs, and takes care of setting up networking and monitoring. Our benchmarks on a metal instance shows an acquire VM from…
Jul 2026 · github.com
- 18AN
2021 · docs.atomist.com
- 19KP
I thought it'd be interesting to use Linux PSI (Pressure Stall Information) for an LLM runtime to trim the KV cache. This is mainly useful imo for edge devices like the Jetson Orin super nano kit which have unified memory. I haven't benched much, but plan to do so more over time and see if I can make a real use of it as I run local LLMs. Let me know if it makes sense :P (I of course vibed this idea)
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 20CA
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…
Jul 2026 · cygnus.run
- 21KA
2016 · github.com
- 22IB
I've been playing with cross platform windows/linux Kubernetes clusters recently and have had endless problems with installer scripts misconfiguring networking by using the wrong NIC etc. I got frustrated with the tooling on windows to debug container networking so I built a tool that attempts to stitch together the HNS (Host Network Service) & HCS (Host Compute Service) resources into a tree that shows the relationship between configs. You can also search over it to find the networking impacting your containers or launch the windows built in packet capture tool to create a network…
2022 · github.com
- 23SS
Hi HN! I've been building a project that handles high-value credentials in-process, and I wanted something more robust than just zeroing memory on drop. A comment on a recent Show HN[0] made me realize that awareness of lower-level memory protection techniques might not be as widespread as I thought. The idea here is to pull out all the tools in one crate, with a relatively simple API. * mlock/VirtualLock to prevent sensitive memory from being swapped (eg the KeePass dump) * Core dump exclusion using MADV_DONTDUMP on Linux & Android * mprotect to minimize exposure over time * Guard…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 24TC
the cloud is a walled garden built for profit [ not efficiency ]. you’re paying for idle, autoscaling is too slow, and serverless is a scam. locked in, overcharged, and out of options. lttle.cloud is different. decentralized, open-source, and built for real performance [ sub-10ms cold start ], true pay-for-what-you-use pricing, and zero vendor lock-in. deploy anything as "serverless" from any docker image, no rewrites, no bullshit. powered by the blockchain and built in public, it’s transparent, efficient, and free from vendor lock-in. run your own private cloud or join the decentralized…
2025
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