explaingit

devsars24/leviathan

Analysis updated 2026-05-18

0RustAudience · developerComplexity · 5/5LicenseSetup · hard

TLDR

Leviathan is a Kubernetes-like container orchestration platform built from scratch in Rust as a systems engineering exercise.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((Leviathan))
    What it does
      Orchestrates containers
      Raft consensus
      Schedules workloads
    Tech stack
      Rust
      Tokio
      gRPC
    Use cases
      Study distributed systems
      Learn Rust async and unsafe code
      Explore container isolation
    Audience
      Systems developers
      Rust learners
    Build phases
      Networking and storage
      Raft consensus
      Container runtime

Code map

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filefunction / class

What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Study a from-scratch implementation of Raft consensus written in Rust.

USE CASE 2

Learn how Linux namespaces and cgroups are used to isolate containers.

USE CASE 3

Follow a structured seven day roadmap for learning advanced Rust systems programming.

USE CASE 4

Reference the workspace layout for structuring a multi-crate Rust project.

What is it built with?

RustTokiogRPCPrometheusRaft

How does it compare?

devsars24/leviathan0xr10t/pulsefi404-agent/codes-miner
Stars000
LanguageRustRustRust
Setup difficultyhardhardmoderate
Complexity5/54/53/5
Audiencedeveloperdeveloperdeveloper

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · hard Time to first run · 1day+

Requires Linux for namespace and cgroups features, aimed at study rather than production deployment.

MIT licensed, so it can be used freely for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as the copyright notice is kept.

In plain English

Leviathan is a container orchestration platform built entirely from scratch in Rust, similar in spirit to Kubernetes but much smaller. The README is explicit that this is not a beginner tutorial project but a structured systems engineering exercise, meant to build distributed consensus, container isolation, resource scheduling, and self healing networking without relying on existing frameworks to do the hard parts. The system is organized around a control plane that holds cluster state and talks to a scheduler for placing workloads, a Raft consensus cluster for leader election and replicating logs across nodes, a write ahead log storage engine using memory mapped files, Prometheus based metrics, and a service discovery layer for internal networking. Worker nodes run the actual containers, which are isolated using Linux namespaces and cgroups v2, the same low level mechanisms real container runtimes use. Operators interact with the whole system through a command line tool built with the Clap library. The README documents the project as a seven day build roadmap, with each day covering a distinct layer: project setup and core types on day one, an async runtime using Tokio on day two, TCP networking and serialization on day three, the write ahead log storage engine on day four, Raft consensus on day five, the container runtime using Linux namespaces and cgroups on day six, and the scheduler plus observability on day seven. All seven days are marked completed. For each phase, the README also lists the specific Rust language features and libraries it exercises, such as async and await, tokio channels, TCP framing, unsafe Rust and raw system calls for container isolation, and bin packing algorithms for scheduling. The project is structured as a Cargo workspace with separate crates for the command line interface and other components, and the README includes a partial breakdown of that folder structure. It does not include install or run instructions beyond describing the workspace layout, since it appears aimed at readers studying the code rather than deploying it. The project is licensed under the MIT license, based on the badge shown at the top of the README.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Explain how Leviathan's Raft consensus implementation handles leader election.
Prompt 2
Walk me through how this project uses Linux namespaces and cgroups to isolate containers.
Prompt 3
Show me how the seven day roadmap in this README maps to the code in the repository.
Prompt 4
Help me understand why this project uses unsafe Rust for its container runtime.

Frequently asked questions

What is leviathan?

Leviathan is a Kubernetes-like container orchestration platform built from scratch in Rust as a systems engineering exercise.

What language is leviathan written in?

Mainly Rust. The stack also includes Rust, Tokio, gRPC.

What license does leviathan use?

MIT licensed, so it can be used freely for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as the copyright notice is kept.

How hard is leviathan to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated hard, with roughly 1day+ to a first successful run.

Who is leviathan for?

Mainly developer.

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