Hyper calls itself a Hypervisor-agnostic Docker Runtime. It boasts the benefits of Virtual Machines and Containers, without the downsides:

  • security
    • using a VM reduces the attach surface and avoids the “shared kernel” problem presented by containers.
  • performance
    • Hyper is able to launch instances in sub-second versus tens of seconds like traditional VM’s.
  • portable
    • the hypervisor is agnostic, it supports KVM, Xen and VirtualBox.
  • immutable

It’s also nice to see their following the OCI Specs for their hypervisor.

Hyper supports Mac OS X, however, due to recent changes in the OS, VirtualBox doesn’t work well, so Hyper doesn’t currently work with Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan).

I look forward to trying out Hyper on my laptop, I’ll probably give it a whirl on Packet.