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Kcore – A modern, API-first virtualization platform built on NixOS

Kcore – A modern, API-first virtualization platform built on NixOS

by jotafi·Mar 16, 2026·2 points·0 comments
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AI Analysis

●●SolidBig BrainBold Bet

NixOS for hypervisor hosts is genuinely clever — atomic rollbacks beat apt upgrade prayers.

Strengths
  • •gRPC API as first-class citizen solves Proxmox's thin REST wrapper problem
  • •Immutable NixOS hosts eliminate configuration drift across cluster nodes
  • •Honest about alpha status — no HA or live migration yet, but foundation is solid
Weaknesses
  • •No web UI yet means manual YAML editing for VM definitions
  • •Missing HA and live migration limits production adoption significantly
Target Audience

DevOps engineers, homelab enthusiasts running Proxmox

Similar To

Proxmox · Terraform · oVirt

Post Description

Hi HN, I'm Riccardo. I've been running Proxmox in production for years. The web UI is fine, but every time I tried to automate VM provisioning — Terraform, CI pipelines, scripting — I hit the same walls: an API that's an afterthought, mutable Debian hosts that drift, Perl internals nobody wants to debug.

So I started building kcore. It's a virtualization platform where the gRPC API is the primary interface. VMs are defined in YAML and applied declaratively. The host OS is NixOS — immutable, atomic updates, instant rollback. The control plane is written in Go.

It's alpha. No HA, no live migration, no web UI yet. But the foundation is solid and the code is on GitHub: https://github.com/rtacconi/kcore

I'd love feedback from anyone who's fought Proxmox's API or run bare-metal Kubernetes. What would you want from a modern hypervisor?

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