Container orchestration you already know

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Under experiment

Banyan is not yet production-ready. We encourage you to experiment, break things, and share feedback.

banyan-cli dashboard —web — monitor your cluster from the browser

From one server to many

You know Docker Compose. You write a docker-compose.yml, run docker compose up, and it works — on one machine.

Then you need more. More servers, more replicas, more availability. The usual next step involves weeks of learning, dozens of new concepts, and infrastructure that’s heavier than your application.

Banyan takes a different approach. Same YAML syntax you already write, distributed across your servers. No new language to learn. No templating. No 50-page getting started guide.

One manifest, production-ready

name: my-app

services:
  caddy:
    image: caddy:latest
    command: caddy reverse-proxy --from example.com --to api:8080
    deploy:
      placement:
        node: gateway-*       # ← pin to your public-facing servers
    ports:
      - "80:80"
      - "443:443"

  api:
    build: ./api
    deploy:
      replicas: 3             # ← scale what you need
      autoscale:
        min: 2
        max: 10
        target_cpu: 70        # ← or let Banyan scale for you
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    environment:
      - DB_HOST=db

  db:
    image: postgres:15-alpine

Same services, build, ports, environment you already know from Docker Compose. Add deploy.replicas to scale, deploy.placement.node to pin services to specific servers. One command to deploy: banyan-cli up -f banyan.yaml.

The YAML you already know

services, build, image, ports, environment, depends_on — same fields, same structure. If you’ve written a docker-compose.yml, you can write a banyan.yaml.

Three binaries, nothing else

banyan-engine, banyan-agent, banyan-cli. No package managers, no plugins, no Helm charts, no YAML templating. Download, run, deploy.

Built-in image registry

Use build: in your manifest and Banyan builds, stores, and distributes images across your cluster. No Docker Hub account needed. No private registry to configure.

Containers talk across servers

Services on different machines communicate as if they were on the same network. All traffic is encrypted with WireGuard. Banyan sets up the overlay network and DNS automatically.

Built-in monitoring

banyan-cli dashboard --web opens a live web dashboard in your browser — cluster overview, agent metrics, container status, log viewer, and command palette. Prefer the terminal? banyan-cli dashboard gives you the same data as a TUI. Both are built into the CLI. No Grafana setup, no separate server — monitoring is one command away.

Self-healing deployments

Container crashes? Restarted automatically based on your restart: policy. Server dies? Work rescheduled to healthy servers within minutes. Banyan checks reality against your manifest every 10 seconds and repairs any drift.

Auto-scaling built in

Define target_cpu in your manifest and Banyan scales replicas automatically. Scale up under load, scale down when idle. Graceful drain prevents dropped requests. Or scale manually with banyan-cli scale my-app api=5.

Encrypted secrets

banyan-cli secret create DB_PASSWORD — encrypted at rest, injected into containers as env vars. No plaintext in manifests or source control. No external Vault to set up.

High availability

Run multiple engines for zero-downtime control plane. All engines are active — no leader election, no manual failover. Start with one engine, add more when you need them.

Open source, self-hosted

Apache 2.0. Inspect the code, modify it, run it on your own servers. No vendor lock-in, no usage-based pricing.

Who is Banyan for?

Teams who’ve outgrown a single server but don’t need — or don’t want — Kubernetes.

• A team of 5 who needs their API running on 3 servers
• A team of 50 who wants a lighter option for staging and internal tools
• Anyone who wants to write a YAML file and ship — not operate a platform

Banyan handles the orchestration so you can focus on the software you’re building.

Get a running cluster

Platform	Architecture	Status
Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Pop!_OS, Mint, RHEL, Fedora, Rocky)	x86_64, ARM64	✅ Supported
macOS		🔜 Coming soon
Windows		❌ Not planned

One-time setup on each machine:

# Control plane
sudo banyan-engine init
sudo systemctl enable --now banyan-engine

# Each agent
sudo banyan-agent init
sudo systemctl enable --now banyan-agent

# Your deploy machine (no sudo after init)
sudo banyan-cli init

Then deploy — every time, one command:

banyan-cli up -f banyan.yaml

Three focused binaries — engine, agent, and CLI. No package managers. No plugins.

Architecture

The CLI sends your manifest to the Engine, which stores state in etcd, manages encrypted secrets, and schedules containers across Agents (with auto-scaling). A reconciliation loop checks every 10 seconds that reality matches your manifest — crashed containers are restarted, dead agents get their work rescheduled. Each Agent runs containerd and pulls images from the Engine’s built-in registry. All communication is encrypted with WireGuard. For high availability, run multiple engines — they coordinate automatically.