Lima becomes a CNCF incubating project

What is Lima? Where Does It Fit in the Cloud Native Landscape? Use cases Lima’s Beginnings and Growth Maintainer Perspective From the TOC Main Components: Notable Milestones Latest release Posted on November 11, 2025 by Lima Project Maintainers CNCF projects highlighted in this post The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept Lima as a CNCF incubating project. Lima enables secure, isolated environments for running cloud native and AI workloads. Lima, short for “Linux Machines,” provides Linux virtual machines optimized for running containers in local development environments. Lima comes with built-in integration for the following container engines : containerd [CNCF Graduated] (default) Docker Podman [CNCF Sandbox] Kubernetes [CNCF Graduated] k3s [CNCF Sandbox] k0s [CNCF Sandbox] Usernetes RKE2 k3s [CNCF Sandbox] k0s [CNCF Sandbox] Usernetes RKE2 Apptainer Lima is also known to be useful for a variety of other use cases beyond containerization. One of the most edgy use cases is to run an AI coding agent inside a VM in order to isolate the agent from direct access to host files and commands. This setup ensures that even if an AI agent is deceived by malicious instructions searched from the Internet (e. g. , fake package installations), any potential damage is confined within the VM or limited to files specified to be mounted from the host. The Lima website features several examples of hardening AI agents: Aider Claude Code Codex Gemini GitHub Copilot CLI GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code The Lima project was launched in May 2021 by Akihiro Suda, a maintainer of containerd and numerous other projects in the container ecosystem. The project was initially designed as a “containerd machine” aiming to demonstrate and promote containerd, including nerdctl (contaiNERD CTL), to Mac users. Later the project scope was expanded to support other container engines and non-container applications as well. Lima supports non-macOS hosts, such as Linux, NetBSD, and Windows.