{"slug": "show-hn-oss-modal-alternative", "title": "Show HN: OSS Modal Alternative", "summary": "Beam released Beta9, an open-source runtime for serverless AI workloads that it positions as an alternative to Modal, offering container cold starts in under a second and fan-out to hundreds of containers. The tool provides a Pythonic interface with GPU support for 4090s and H100s, autoscaling endpoints, scheduled background tasks, and distributed volume storage, installable via pip install beam-client. Beta9 can be self-hosted for free or run on Beam's managed cloud platform.", "body_md": "**[Beam](https://beam.cloud?utm_source=github_readme)** is a fast, open-source runtime for serverless AI workloads. It gives you a Pythonic interface to deploy and scale AI applications with zero infrastructure overhead.\n\n- **Fast Cold Starts** : Launch containers in under a second using a custom container runtime, scheduler, and embedded caching\n- **Parallelization and Concurrency** : Fan out workloads to 100s of containers\n- **First-Class Developer Experience** : Hot-reloading, webhooks, and scheduled jobs\n- **Scale-to-Zero** : Workloads are serverless by default\n- **Volume Storage** : Mount distributed storage volumes\n- **GPU Support** : Run on our cloud (4090s, H100s, and more) or bring your own GPUs\n\n```\npip install beam-client\n```\n\n1. Create an account [here](https://beam.cloud?utm_source=github_readme)\n2. Follow our [Getting Started Guide](https://platform.beam.cloud/onboarding?utm_source=github_readme)\n\nSpin up isolated containers to run LLM-generated code:\n\n``` python\nfrom beam import Image, Sandbox\n\nsandbox = Sandbox(image=Image()).create()\nresponse = sandbox.process.run_code(\"print('I am running remotely')\")\n\nprint(response.result)\n```\n\nCreate an autoscaling endpoint for your custom model:\n\n``` python\nfrom beam import Image, endpoint\nfrom beam import QueueDepthAutoscaler\n\n@endpoint(\n    image=Image(python_version=\"python3.11\"),\n    gpu=\"A10G\",\n    cpu=2,\n    memory=\"16Gi\",\n    autoscaler=QueueDepthAutoscaler(max_containers=5, tasks_per_container=30)\n)\ndef handler():\n    return {\"label\": \"cat\", \"confidence\": 0.97}\n```\n\nSchedule resilient background tasks (or replace your Celery queue) by adding a simple decorator:\n\n``` python\nfrom beam import Image, TaskPolicy, schema, task_queue\n\nclass Input(schema.Schema):\n    image_url = schema.String()\n\n@task_queue(\n    name=\"image-processor\",\n    image=Image(python_version=\"python3.11\"),\n    cpu=1,\n    memory=1024,\n    inputs=Input,\n    task_policy=TaskPolicy(max_retries=3),\n)\ndef my_background_task(input: Input, *, context):\n    image_url = input.image_url\n    print(f\"Processing image: {image_url}\")\n    return {\"image_url\": image_url}\n\nif __name__ == \"__main__\":\n    # Invoke a background task from your app (without deploying it)\n    my_background_task.put(image_url=\"https://example.com/image.jpg\")\n\n    # You can also deploy this behind a versioned endpoint with:\n    # beam deploy app.py:my_background_task --name image-processor\n```\n\nBeta9 is the open-source engine powering [Beam](https://beam.cloud), our fully-managed cloud platform. You can self-host Beta9 for free or choose managed cloud hosting through Beam.\n\nWe welcome contributions big or small. These are the most helpful things for us:\n\n- Submit a [feature request](https://github.com/beam-cloud/beta9/issues/new?assignees=&labels=&projects=&template=feature-request.md&title=) or[bug report](https://github.com/beam-cloud/beta9/issues/new?assignees=&labels=&projects=&template=bug-report.md&title=)\n- Open a PR with a new feature or improvement", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-oss-modal-alternative", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/beam-cloud/beta9/", "published_at": "2026-09-13 15:34:24+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-13 15:44:42.328526+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-infrastructure", "developer-tools", "ai-tools", "ai-products", "mlops"], "entities": ["Beam", "Beta9", "Modal", "Python", "H100", "4090"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-oss-modal-alternative", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-oss-modal-alternative.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-oss-modal-alternative.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-oss-modal-alternative.jsonld"}}