Ubicloud

Ubicloud is an open source cloud that can run anywhere. Think of it as an open alternative to cloud providers, like what Linux is to proprietary operating systems.

Ubicloud provides IaaS cloud features on bare metal providers, such as Hetzner, Leaseweb, and AWS Bare Metal. You can set it up yourself on these providers or you can use our managed service.

What you can run

Service	What you get
Virtual machines	Linux VMs on Cloud Hypervisor, with public IPv4 and IPv6, private networking, and encrypted disks.
Managed PostgreSQL	The latest Postgres versions, with high availability (one or two standbys), read replicas, point-in-time restore, major version upgrades, PgBouncer, and metrics and log export. Runs on bare metal, AWS, and GCP.
Kubernetes	Managed Kubernetes clusters with node pools.
GitHub Actions runners	x64 and arm64 runners in standard and premium sizes. You switch by changing runs-on.
AI inference	Inference endpoints for open-weight models, with API keys and a playground.
Networking	Private subnets, firewalls, and load balancers.

You can manage all of these from the cloud console, the REST API (OpenAPI spec), the ubi CLI, or Terraform.

Quick start

Managed platform

You can use Ubicloud without installing anything. When you do this, we pass along the underlying provider's benefits to you, such as price or location.

https://console.ubicloud.com

Build your own cloud

You can also build your own cloud. To do this, start up Ubicloud's control plane and connect to its cloud console.

git clone [email protected]:ubicloud/ubicloud.git

# Generate secrets for demo
./demo/generate_env

# Run containers: db-migrator, app (web & respirate), postgresql
docker-compose -f demo/docker-compose.yml up

# Visit localhost:3000

The control plane is responsible for cloudifying bare metal Linux machines. The easiest way to build your own cloud is to lease instances from one of those providers. For example: https://www.hetzner.com/sb

Once you lease instance(s), update the .env file with the following environment variables:

• HETZNER_USER
• HETZNER_PASSWORD
• HETZNER_SSH_PUBLIC_KEY
• HETZNER_SSH_PRIVATE_KEY

To get the user credentials, create a user according to these instructions. The SSH key is the one you set when you created the robot server.

The first thing to make sure is you use the hetzner robot rescue system to install ubuntu 24.04.

Then, run the following script for each instance to cloudify it. Currently, the script cloudifies bare metal instances leased from Hetzner. After you cloudify your instances, you can provision and manage cloud resources on these machines.

# Enter hostname/IP and provider
docker exec -it ubicloud-app ./demo/cloudify_server

Later when you create VMs, Ubicloud will assign them IPv6 addresses. If your ISP doesn't support IPv6, please use a VPN or tunnel broker such as Mullvad or Hurricane Electric's https://tunnelbroker.net/ to connect. Alternatively, you could lease IPv4 addresses from your provider and add them to your control plane.

Why use it

Public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have made life easier for start-ups and enterprises. But they are closed source, have you rent computers at a huge premium, and lock you in. Ubicloud offers an open source alternative, reduces your costs, and returns control of your infrastructure back to you. All without sacrificing the cloud's convenience.

Today, AWS offers about two hundred cloud services. Ultimately, we will implement 10% of the cloud services that make up 80% of that consumption.

Example workloads and reasons to use Ubicloud today include:

• You run CI on GitHub Actions and want faster, cheaper runners. Our managed cloud is ~3x cheaper than AWS, and moving a workflow is a one-line change.

• You want a managed Postgres database with high availability and backups, and you want to choose where it runs: on bare metal for price, or on AWS next to the rest of your stack.

• You have bare metal machines sitting somewhere. You'd like to build your own cloud for portability, security, or compliance reasons.

How a service is built

Every Ubicloud service follows the same pattern. The control plane stores the desired state of each resource in Postgres. State machines, which we call progs (see prog/), move each resource toward that state by running commands on data plane hosts over SSH. A higher-level service is a composition of the same primitives that you can use directly: VMs, block storage, private subnets, and firewalls.

Managed PostgreSQL is a good example, because it asks the most of those primitives: it needs fast and durable disks, a stable private network, and careful failover.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗