Alternatives to Cloud Hypervisor
An open source virtual machine monitor written in Rust for running modern cloud workloads on KVM. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Cloud Hypervisor
An open source virtual machine monitor written in Rust for running modern cloud workloads on KVM.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Cloud Hypervisor.
Firecracker
Run isolated workloads inside lightweight Linux microVMs.
Firecracker runs lightweight Linux microVMs for container and function workloads under the Apache-2.0 license, and it likewise needs Linux virtualization support and low-level configuration.
crosvm
A hosted virtual machine monitor written in Rust that runs guest operating systems inside sandboxed virtual devices.
crosvm is another Rust VMM on KVM that isolates each virtual device in its own sandbox, and you supply your own kernel and root file system image.
QEMU
The machine emulator and virtualiser that most of the Linux virtualisation stack is built on.
QEMU emulates a much wider range of hardware and architectures, suiting legacy guests, but raw QEMU has a large and unfriendly command line option surface.
krunvm
A command-line tool that creates lightweight microVMs from OCI container images using libkrun.
krunvm creates lightweight microVMs directly from OCI container images using libkrun, runs on Linux and macOS, and is not open source.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Kata Containers
An open-source container runtime that runs each container inside a lightweight virtual machine for stronger isolation.
KVM
The Linux kernel's built-in hypervisor for hardware-accelerated virtual machines.
libvirt
A toolkit, daemon and API for managing KVM, QEMU, Xen, LXC and other virtualization platforms.
KubeVirt
A Kubernetes add-on that runs and manages traditional virtual machines alongside containers.
