Modern cloud patterns have transformed infrastructure management, shifting the responsibility from local service providers to managed services as businesses increasingly prefer turnkey solutions. As virtualization evolves, traditional IaaS is being overshadowed by PaaS offerings from hyperscalers like AWS and GCP, which present challenges for local providers. The rise of containerization technologies, particularly Kubernetes, further emphasizes the need for intelligent orchestration and automation in managing workloads.

Flintlock is a community-driven service for creating and managing microVMs on host machines, supporting Cloud Hypervisor and Firecracker VMMs. Initially developed by Weaveworks for Kubernetes clusters, it is now useful for a variety of lightweight virtualization needs, with features for lifecycle management and metrics exposure. Contributions and feedback are encouraged from the community.