# liquidmetal-dev/flintlock

Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking MicroVMs. Create and manage the lifecycle of MicroVMs backed by containerd.

Repository: https://github.com/liquidmetal-dev/flintlock
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/flintlock
Homepage: https://flintlock.liquidmetal.dev/
Language: Go
License: MPL-2.0
License Family: copyleft
Topics: firecracker, cni, microvm, oci, kvm
Last push: 2026-08-10T23:15:31+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 92/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 97, release rhythm 82, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 1892, "days_push": 23, "days_rel": 42, "gap_med": 50, "n_releases_24m": 6}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1477, forks 72 (observed 2026-08-28T04:04:50.346382+00:00)

## What it is
Flintlock is a Go service for creating and managing the lifecycle of microVMs on a host machine, backed by containerd and supporting Firecracker and Cloud Hypervisor VMMs. It exposes gRPC and HTTP APIs to create, start, stop, pause, and delete microVMs using OCI images for volumes, kernels, and initrds.

## Use cases
- create and manage microvms on a bare-metal host
- run microvms as nodes in a virtualized kubernetes cluster
- provision isolated lightweight vms for workloads
- use oci container images to supply vm kernels and root filesystems
- manage microvm lifecycle via grpc or http api
- configure vm metadata with cloud-init or ignition

## When to choose
- you need lightweight, fast-booting VMs on bare-metal Linux hosts with KVM
- you want to provision microVMs as Kubernetes nodes via Cluster API Provider Microvm
- you prefer OCI images over large filesystem images for VM kernels and volumes
- you want a programmatic gRPC/HTTP API for microVM lifecycle management

## When to avoid
- you need full VMs with broad OS or GPU support rather than lightweight microVMs
- your host lacks KVM support or runs non-Linux operating systems
- you only need container orchestration without VM isolation
- you need CNI networking support today, as it is not yet fully available

## Facets
- artifact type: service
- maturity: active
- function: microservices, container-runtime, api-framework, deployment
- domain: cloud-computing, infrastructure-as-code, developer-tools, self-hosted
- platform: go, cli, self-hosted
- tags: microvm, firecracker, cloud-hypervisor, containerd, oci-images, kubernetes-nodes, grpc, lightweight-virtualization, bare-metal, virtualization, containers, linux

## Member repositories
- liquidmetal-dev/flintlock (main) score 92

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:50.346382+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T04:34:24.897770+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/liquidmetal-dev/flintlock (fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:50.346382+00:00, sha 926fb85d01f2)
  - homepage: https://flintlock.liquidmetal.dev/ (fetched 2026-08-29T11:41:31.482560+00:00, sha d81e4aacb11d)
  - site_page: https://flintlock.liquidmetal.dev/docs/intro (fetched 2026-08-29T11:41:31.491502+00:00, sha 0447285f9d8f)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.