Nanos resource

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: prerelease_only

Adoption not part of the score

1512 stars · 146 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Nanos is a unikernel written in C that runs exactly one application in a virtualized environment, with no users, ssh, or multi-process support, dramatically reducing attack surface and footprint. It is typically built and deployed via the companion OPS tool, which packages ELF binaries and deploys images to hypervisors and public clouds.

Use cases

• package a node.js server as a minimal secure VM image
• deploy single-purpose microservices to AWS, GCE, or Azure as unikernels
• run a static Go binary in a tiny fast-booting VM
• reduce attack surface for edge services
• sandbox an application with hypervisor-level isolation
• build minimal VM images instead of using containers

When to choose

• you want minimal, secure, single-application VM images for cloud or edge deployment
• you need fast boot times and small footprints compared to containers or full VMs
• you run one static binary or interpreted-language service per instance

When to avoid

• you need a general-purpose OS with multiple processes, users, or ssh access
• you need to run many heterogeneous services on one host
• your workload requires kernel features or drivers Nanos does not support

Facets

infra-config · maturity active

container-runtime security deployment cloud operating-systems cloud-computing security self-hosted cloud self-hosted unikernel kernel virtualization microvm sandbox edge-computing single-process-os ops-tool devops linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="nanovms/ops")