Thanks for visiting, this organization contains all the projects related to Liquid Metal.
🎉 This project was originally developed by Weaveworks but is now owned & run by the community. If you are interested in helping out please reach out.
Liquid Metal is a set of open source projects for running lightweight virtual machines (microVMs) on your own hardware and managing them declaratively.
- Hard isolation, light footprint: every workload gets its own kernel and a real KVM boundary, without the overhead of a full VM
- Fast to boot, fast to throw away: microVMs start in close to container time
- More from your hardware: pack more workloads onto each bare-metal host, from datacenter servers to the edge
- Standard building blocks: Firecracker, Cloud Hypervisor, containerd, KVM and Kubernetes
Use it for:
- Kubernetes clusters with microVMs as nodes
- CI runners with a fresh microVM per job
- Ephemeral environments for previews, tests and development
- AI agent sandboxes to run untrusted code in
Hang on, what is this microVM thing you mention!?! A microVM is a very lightweight virtual machine that optimizes for speed and less resource consumption over supporting a wide array of devices. It gives you the isolation of a VM with close to the speed of a container.
Head over to liquidmetal.dev. The 30 minute tutorial builds a Liquid Metal platform on your own Linux machine.
- flintlock - an agent on each host machine that creates and manages microVMs via API calls. It does not know about Kubernetes, so you can use it to start a microVM for any task. It uses containerd so that container images can be the kernel and volumes for a microVM.
- Cluster API Provider Microvm (CAPMVM) - a Cluster API infrastructure provider. It creates microVMs on Flintlock hosts and bootstraps Kubernetes on them, so a microVM becomes a whole Kubernetes node.
- microvm-operator (experimental) - manage microVMs as Kubernetes resources:
Microvm,MicrovmReplicaSetandMicrovmDeployment. - brigade (experimental) - a distributed orchestrator that speaks the Flintlock API and schedules microVMs across a fleet of hosts.
- battery (experimental) - a warm pool manager that keeps pre-booted microVMs ready to claim instantly.
- guest-agent (experimental) - an agent inside the microVM that lets the host run commands and copy files over vsock.
- muster (pre-alpha) - runs each GitHub Actions job in a fresh microVM.
- image-builder - builds the container images that we use for microVM kernels and root volumes.
- hammertime and fl - CLIs for interacting with Flintlock.
- mikrolite - an experimental CLI for creating microVMs without Flintlock.
- flintlock-terraform and terraform-equinix-liquidmetal - Terraform support for Flintlock and for a Liquid Metal platform on Equinix Metal.
- EKS-Anywhere (EKS-A) (poc) - we have been working on adding CAPMVM as a provider to EKS-A.
Get in contact with us if you want to learn more about Liquid Metal. You can hit us up in any of these ways:
- Liquid Metal channel on the CNCF Slack
- By creating an issue / discussion in one of the projects