Katakate

Infrastructure

self-hosted vm orchestration

SHOW HN2025

124points
53comments
#603of 3,837 in 2025
Top 16%of 2025 by points

How HN took it

MixedNo clear lean

3 positive, 6 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 5 critical, out of 15 comments about the project. Thread score -0.03.

Idea: 1 for, 2 againstPrivacy: 0 for, 2 againstExecution: 1 for, 0 againstDesign: 0 for, 1 againstPricing: 1 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Strong isolation via hardware virtualization and clean Python/K8s design

    From 3 comments
    • as someone in the space this ticks a lot of boxes: kubernetes-native, strong isolation, python sdk (ideal for ML scenarios). devmapper is a nice ootb approach. Glancing at the…
      alexeldeib on HN
    • Great project. There's been multiple approaches/tools in the space(top of my head I can think of e2b, arrakis, claude's new tool). how is this different?
      Bnjoroge on HN
    • Thanks! I'll review Arrakis and come back. E2B is often considered harder to setup and less AI engineers friendly for direct stack contributions, as Katakate is the only…
      gbxk on HN
  • Maker responsive to security feedback, fixed DNS exfiltration default

    From 2 comments
    • > One thing I could do is make it exposed in config, to allow the user to block all DNS resolutions until Cilium is integrated. LMK if desired! Yes, but it's not great for it to…
      srcreigh on HN
    • Test passed, PR merged
      gbxk on HN

Objections

  • No business model; maker worried about future rug-pull

    From 1 comment
    • > No business model short-term. My goal is broad adoption, 100% open-source. IMHO that's kind of a red flag. There's a happy path here where it's successful but stays…
      yjftsjthsd-h on HN
  • Default DNS allowance enables data exfiltration

    From 2 comments
    • ``` name: project-build image: alpine:latest namespace: default egress_whitelist: - "1.1.1.1/32" # Cloudflare DNS - "8.8.8.8/32" # Google DNS ``` This is basically a wide-open…
      srcreigh on HN
    • > One thing I could do is make it exposed in config, to allow the user to block all DNS resolutions until Cilium is integrated. LMK if desired! Yes, but it's not great for it to…
      srcreigh on HN
  • Only works on Linux with KVM, not cloud or Mac ARM initially

    From 1 comment
    • (sorry I didn't reply in-thread, I'm new to HN, re-posting response here:) Exactly! The main local requirement is to have hardware virtualization available (e.g. /dev/kvm) but…
      gbxk on HN

Requests

  • Kubernetes CRD or native API support instead of CLI

    From 1 comment
    • This seems like an amazing stack that ticks a lot of boxes for me, but I really dislike cli or a custom api as the UX for this and would prefer to manage all of this with CRDs so…
      empath75 on HN
  • Local-first sandboxing support

    From 1 comment
    • I would really like to see a good local sandboxing solution in this space, something that is truly local-first. This is especially important since many coding models / agentic…
      mentalgear on HN
  • TEE or side-channel protection

    From 2 comments
    • Are there any such solutions that can adequately protect against side-channel attacks (à la rowhammer, meltdown, spectre, ...)? I mean protecting local file access and network…
      elric on HN
    • That's an interesting direction! TEE support would be relatively straightforward with current stack (and it's on my roadmap), so that could be a first step forward.
      gbxk on HN

Questions

  • How is it different from E2B, Arrakis, or gVisor

    From 2 comments
    • Great project. There's been multiple approaches/tools in the space(top of my head I can think of e2b, arrakis, claude's new tool). how is this different?
      Bnjoroge on HN
    • Looks like an interesting project. Do you have any comments on how it is different from running gVisor?
      re_spond on HN
  • Does it run on cloud VMs with nested virtualization

    From 1 comment
    • There are some providers that offer KVM nested virtualization, I think Google Cloud, Digital Ocean ... any others?
      ofrzeta on HN

Alternatives named

  • E2B

    From 2 comments
    • Great project. There's been multiple approaches/tools in the space(top of my head I can think of e2b, arrakis, claude's new tool). how is this different?
      Bnjoroge on HN
    • Is this basically an open-source DIY version of E2B? If so, cool! AFAICT E2B is open-source licensed but tricky to setup.
      bigwheels on HN
  • gVisor

    From 1 comment
    • Looks like an interesting project. Do you have any comments on how it is different from running gVisor?
      re_spond on HN
  • Apple containers

    From 1 comment
    • What about this: https://github.com/apple/container
      _false on HN
  • Anthropic sandbox-runtime

    From 1 comment
    • Anthropic recently released a sandboxing tool based on bubblewrap (Linux, quite lightweight) and sandbox-exec (macOS). https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime I…
      dloss on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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