What is Kiste
Kisten are fast, isolated cloud machines with a desktop, for people and for agents.
A Kiste (German for crate; plural Kisten) is a cloud machine (a Firecracker microVM) of your own. It starts in seconds, runs Ubuntu 24.04 with a full GNOME desktop and a complete developer toolchain, and is isolated from every other Kiste by its own kernel, memory and disk.
You work in a Kiste the way you prefer:
- in a terminal, over SSH, without opening a single port on your network;
- in the browser, on its desktop, from any computer, tablet or phone;
- from scripts and agents, with exact command execution, a JSON output mode and an HTTP API.
When you are done, you stop it and it costs no compute while its disk waits for you, or you stop it with its session and it resumes in about a second with every window and process as you left them. You can fork a running Kiste into an independent copy, publish a port at its own web address, and every Kiste is checkpointed automatically, encrypted and kept off-site.
What is in a Kiste
| Operating system | Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with GNOME |
| Default size | 4 vCPU, 8 GiB memory, 80 GiB disk |
| Large size | 8 vCPU, 16 GiB memory, 160 GiB disk |
| Browsers | Firefox, Google Chrome |
| Languages | Node.js with npm, pnpm, Bun and Deno; Python with pip and uv; Go; Rust; Java, Kotlin, Scala; Ruby; PHP; .NET; Erlang and Elixir; R |
| Tools | git, Docker, GCC, Clang, CMake, SQLite, jq, ripgrep, media and Android tools |
| Coding agents | Codex and Claude Code, ready to run |
| Access | SSH (root), the browser desktop, a browser terminal, the HTTP API |
The exact versions are listed in Images and environments.
How you use it
Install the CLI with one command; it verifies its own signature. See Install the CLI.
Sign in with kiste login. Your browser approves the computer, and the
computer gets an SSH key that all your Kisten accept.
Create a Kiste with kiste new. You land in its shell; kiste desktop
opens its desktop in the browser.
The Quickstart walks through it in five minutes.