Nstance is a faster alternative to traditional Auto-Scaling Groups (ASGs), replacing glue scripts and complexity with a cloud-agnostic VM provisioner.
Nstance is Open Source, released under the Apache 2.0 license.
Key features:
-
Faster instance scaling: Provision Kubernetes nodes faster than traditional bootstrap and certificate workflow methods.
-
Not just for Kubernetes: Agnostic design for any workload e.g. Docker Compose VMs, NAT gateways, and more.
-
Multi-Cloud & Hybrid-Cloud: Supports public cloud (AWS, Google Cloud) and on-prem/private cloud (Proxmox VE).
-
Self Healing & Instance Expiry: Automatic detection and replacement of unhealthy instances. Automatic rotation with configurable expiry.
-
Built-in CA: Integrated certificate authority for fast and secure certificate issuance and renewal/rotation.
-
Spot Instance Support: With Kubernetes node draining and termination handling.
-
Kubernetes Auto-Scaling: Nstance includes its own Operator and CRDs which enables integration with the Cluster Autoscaler via Cluster API.
-
On-Demand Instances: Using Kubernetes Pod annotations, the Nstance Operator will create a new dedicated VM for the lifetime of the Pod.
-
Multi-Tenancy: Run one or more Kubernetes clusters with isolation on each Nstance cluster.
Nstance is designed to be simple and easy to operate. To achieve a balance of lowest cost, highest reliability, and easiest operation, Nstance uses simple yet proven cloud primitives - VMs (and optionally, ASGs), a secrets store (such as AWS Secrets Manager), and object storage (such as AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, or S3-compatible services supporting If-Match headers such as Ceph RGW or SeaweedFS).
Check out the comprehensive documentation in ./docs or read it rendered on the official Nstance website at https://nstance.dev
See docs/development/local-setup.md for development environment setup and usage.
Nstance is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Copyright 2026 Nadrama Pty Ltd.
See the LICENSE file for details.