Introduction
Machina is a private cloud for KVM hosts you own. It gives you VM management, browser consoles, a multi-host fleet with HA and DRS, an OpenStack-style self-service cloud, a native eBPF network datapath and AI-assisted operations, from a handful of Rust services on plain Linux.
Who it is for
- Teams leaving VMware who want HA, DRS and live migration on open KVM/libvirt.
- Teams that looked at OpenStack and wanted the same primitives without a six-week deployment project.
- Operators of labs, branches and sovereign regions who need one person to install, understand and upgrade the whole stack.
The pieces
| You run | You get |
|---|---|
machina-daemon on a host | VMs, storage, networks, consoles, sign-in and RBAC, a REST API and the web UI |
+ machina-controller and an agent per host | A fleet: HA failover with fencing, DRS, live migration, Fleet Cloud, Zyra AI |
+ machina-bpfd on each host | eBPF load balancing, Kubernetes CNI, DDoS shield, VM isolation and flow visibility |
+ BMC addresses of machines with no OS | Bare-metal provisioning: discover, commission, deploy an image, join |
+ VPCs that must reach each other or the internet | VPC forwarding and network ACLs |
+ a production site | Production hardening: strict profile, key rollover, audit retention |
See Architecture for how they connect.
What it replaces
| Instead of | Machina uses |
|---|---|
| Nova, Glance, Cinder, Heat, Octavia | Fleet Cloud on the controller |
| Masakari and Watcher | Built-in HA and DRS |
| A VNC/SPICE gateway | Console proxies in the daemon |
| Cilium, Tetragon, kube-proxy, a firewall agent | machina-bpfd and machina-cni |
| MariaDB/Galera and RabbitMQ | Embedded SQLite or PostgreSQL, optional NATS |
| Nova, Neutron or Keystone clients | The EC2-compatible API and Machina's REST API |
Moving off OpenStack? Read Replacing OpenStack, which includes what Machina does not cover.
Where to start
- Requirements, then the Quickstart.
- Virtual machines and Consoles for day one.
- Fleet, HA and DRS when you add a second host.
- Native eBPF for networking and security.
- Configuration, Upgrade and backup and Troubleshooting for operations.
- The Reference section for ports, environment variables and the API.