Volant — Spin up real microVMs in 10 seconds

cc — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 23:35:35 +0000

TL;DR: Run real microVMs (with their own kernel, isolation, and VFIO GPU passthrough) as easily as Docker containers.

Why I Built Volant

For years, containers have been the default runtime surface — simple, fast, convenient.
But under the hood, they still share the host kernel. That means limited isolation, security tradeoffs, and dependency hell when it comes to hardware.

MicroVMs solve that. They give each workload its own kernel and hardware-level boundaries — but until now, using them meant writing YAML, stitching APIs, and fighting systemd.

I wanted something that felt like:

volar vms create web --plugin caddy

…and just works.

What Volant Does

Volant is a modular microVM orchestration engine.
It ships a control plane, CLI, and in-guest agent that speak a shared manifest system — kind of like Docker for microVMs.

Highlights
• Docker compatibility — boot OCI images directly via plugins
• Initramfs support — build blazing-fast appliances with fledge
• cloud-init support — perfect for dev sandboxes or self-contained workloads
• GPU/VFIO passthrough — run AI/ML workloads securely in real microVMs
• Kubernetes-style scaling — declarative deployments & replicas
• Hardware isolation — each workload has its own kernel

⸻

Quick Start

curl -fsSL https://get.volantvm.com | bash
volar plugins install --manifest https://github.com/volantvm/initramfs-plugin-example/releases/latest/download/caddy.json
volar vms create web --plugin caddy --cpu 2 --memory 512
curl 192.168.127.10
# → Hello from Caddy in a Volant microVM! 🚀

That’s a real kernel boot, not a container.
From zero to HTTP 200 in about 10 seconds.

Architecture

Volant ships three components:
• volantd — control plane + SQLite registry
• volar — CLI client
• kestrel — guest agent (PID 1 inside microVMs)

Plugins are built with fledge, which can convert Docker/OCI images into bootable rootfs or initramfs artifacts.

You can even declare deployments like:

volar deployments create web-cluster --config web-config.json --replicas 5

…and get 5 isolated microVMs, each with their own IP and kernel.

Example Plugins

Caddy plugin — initramfs-based (fast boot, tiny footprint)
NGINX plugin — boots straight from the Docker image

What’s Next

• PaaS-style experience with snapshot-restore (serverless-style workloads)
• Multi-node orchestration
• Built-in registry for plugin discovery

Get Involved

• GitHub: volantvm/volant
• Docs: docs.volantvm.com
• Email: hello@volantvm.com

Would love to hear what you think, especially if you’re into infrastructure, unikernels, or VM orchestration.
Comments, forks, and PRs are all welcome.

Volant — designed for stealth, speed, and scale. 🦅