Alternatives
Products that do what Rootless Containers/Pods that run systemd, Docker, and even Kubernetes does
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…
- 1DE
Devbox is a command-line tool that lets you easily create isolated shells and containers. You start by defining the list of packages required by your development environment, and devbox uses that definition to create an isolated environment just for your application. In practice, Devbox works similar to a package manager like yarn – except the packages it manages are at the operating-system level (the sort of thing you would normally install with brew or apt-get). See it in action: https://youtu.be/WMBaXQZmDoA
2022 · github.com
- 2IV
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
- 3DC
I've been frustrated with dependency hell and clutter on my VPS from dev, so I built Devbox: a lightweight, open-source CLI tool that spins up isolated development environments using Docker. Each project runs in its own container, but your code stays in simple flat folders on the host machine—no messing with volumes or sync issues. Environments are disposable, so you can nuke and recreate them without losing your work. Key features: - Instant setup: `devbox init my-project` and you're in a fresh env with `devbox shell`. - Configurable via JSON: Define packages, services, and more in a…
Sep 2025 · devbox.ar0.eu
- 4
A fast, rootless sandbox and virtual resource runtime for any workload, including untrusted and AI-generated code. Daemonless: a real, kernel-enforced container in ~3.5 ms from an OCI image, out of one static binary - getkern/kern
13d ago · github.com
- 5GB
I built this because I was always creating machines on GH actions to test builds on different OS, and I wanted a tight CLI that could do it. I always saw Actions as this great resources and ephemeral machines you could do dev work in just were a natural way for me to work, so this grew out of that workflow. I didn't expect it to blow up, so it wasn't 100% finished when I posted it. But it should stabilize pretty quickly. Happy to know what you think and talk about it.
May 2026 · ghost.charity
- 6
- 7BD
Hi HN, we’re Nick and Drew, and we’re building boxes.dev – the first cloud-only agentic dev environment (ADE) that gives every Codex and Claude Code agent its own cloud computer. We’re two engineers who previously built Gem (co-founder/CTO and first hire), and we spent the last year coding almost exclusively using Codex and Claude Code. It’s been a huge change to how we code, and it’s been exhilarating seeing the models keep getting better – but we eventually realized that developing on localhost was holding us back: - Git worktrees are clunky to set up and use for parallelizing work -…
Jun 2026 · boxes.dev
- 8
- 9NA
Hi HN, I've been building Nucleus, a lightweight Linux container runtime focused on two workloads: ephemeral AI-agent sandboxes and declarative NixOS services. It's a single Rust binary, no daemon. It is not a Docker replacement and not a strict subset of Docker either. I dropped the entire image-and-distribution half (no Dockerfile, no layers, no registry, no pull/push, no persistent storage layer) in exchange for going deeper on isolation and reproducibility. The rootfs is either a directory copied into tmpfs (agent mode) or a Nix-built closure mounted read-only (production mode). If…
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 10
- 11CC
Hi HN - We've been working on Coasts (“containerized hosts”) to make it so you can run multiple localhost instances, and multiple docker-compose runtimes, across git worktrees on the same computer. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRiySdGQZZA. There are also videos in our docs that give a good conceptual overview: https://coasts.dev/docs/learn-coasts-videos. Agents can make code changes in different worktrees in isolation, but it's hard for them to test their changes without multiple localhost runtimes that are isolated and scoped to those…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 12VQ
2020 · github.com
- 13LV
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
- 14SY
Hi again HN, we’re Arjun and Anirudh, founders of Signadot (YC W20). Signadot helps teams developing microservices test their changes using lightweight environments called “Sandboxes”. We use a relatively new approach, using traffic labeling (using OpenTelemetry) and request routing (using a Service Mesh) to isolate environments in a shared Kubernetes cluster. Today, we’re launching a new feature to help developers with local testing of microservices during the iterative development process. When we initially launched in September last year…
2023 · signadot.com
- 15DC
Hi everyone - Looking for feedback for this new open source project we launched. It's called DevPod and it's built on the devcontainer.json standard to create reproducible dev environments. It lets you spin up dev environments in any infra, kind of like a Terraform but for dev environments. Compared to hosted services such as Github Codespaces, JetBrains Spaces, or Google Cloud Workstations, DevPod has the following advantages: - Open Source: DevPod is 100% open-source and extensible. A provider doesn’t exist? Just create your own. - Client-only: No need to install a server backend. DevPod…
2023 · github.com
- 16RW
I've been working with a partner team to integrate wasm workloads with existing container toolchains with the goal of enabling wasm workloads anywhere, be it on the edge, in kubernetes, or wherever. To that end, this project implements a containerd shim which runs those wasm workloads. It is designed as a library to bring your own host implementation, but also includes an implementation for WASI. Right now the library assumes you are using wasmtime, which is embedded in. It works either standalone (run with containerd directly) or in kubernetes. Kubernetes networking and storage are wired…
2022 · github.com
- 17RS
Hey HN, Rove is a deployment tool that I've been working on for a short while. I was motivated to create this after building a CD SaaS for AWS, and becoming disillusioned with the unnecessary complexity and costs associated with running containers in proprietary "cloud" runtimes. Rove is very different from that. It is a single binary, does not communicate with an external service, and deployments run in a single command. Deployments are diffed so you can see changes before applying them, sort of like Terraform. There is no proprietary runtime because everything just runs on Docker Swarm…
2024 · rove.dev
- 18TM
Hi, we are a small team from Vienna and today released our first version of a Package Manager similar to apt, Homebrew, or Chocolatey, but specifically tailored for Kubernetes environments and cloud-native software. Originally, we wanted to contribute to the Kubernetes ecosystem with a different idea; however, after talking to the community, we uncovered that package management is an even bigger problem at the moment. We are now looking for as much feedback as possible, so we would really appreciate it if you could check it out and let us know what you think! Thanks!
2024 · github.com
- 19MC
Runbox recreates core container features without relying on existing runtimes or external libraries. It uses namespaces, cgroups v2, and seccomp to create an isolated process environment, with a simple shell for interaction. For future gonna work on adding an interface so external applications can be executed inside Runbox, similar to containers. Github: https://github.com/Sahilb315/runbox Happy to hear feedback or suggestions.
Dec 2025 · github.com
- 20H1
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 21OD
I have been building https://github.com/openrundev/openrun for the last few years and recently added Kubernetes support https://openrun.dev/docs/container/kubernetes. OpenRun is a declarative web app deployment platform, built for teams to deploy internal tools. There are many tools which try to simplify application deployments, but not many support declarative deployments. Even if app sources are fetched from git, creating new apps or updating app config requires imperative commands. Kubernetes is the dominant declarative approach, but it takes…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 22BB
This project addresses the inefficiencies of traditional Dockerfile-based container builds where each customization layer creates storage bloat through duplicate dependencies from repeated apt-get install commands, network inefficiency from redundant package downloads across different images, and slow iteration cycles requiring full rebuilds of all previous steps. Our solution enables building minimal base images from scratch using debootstrap that precisely include only required components in the initial build, while allowing creation of specialized variants (Java, Kafka, etc.) from these…
2025 · github.com
- 23IB
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
- 24LZ
Hey everyone, We recently open-sourced the deployment framework we use at Jetpack to deploy our web sites and services to Kubernetes, and we wanted to share it with the community! Our goal was to simplify the developer workflow for deploying to Kubernetes, and to reduce the time needed to onboard new developers. With Launchpad, our developers can provision their access with a single login, and start deploying to Kubernetes with just `launchpad up`. We also wrote a blog post describing why we built launchpad, and the benefits we've seen here:…
2022 · github.com
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