8 ms·

Ubicloud – open, free and portable cloud

212 points by dkgs1998 3y ago

bashy 3y ago
The thing you pay for with cloud servers is not having to do the up-keep of the host machine. They tend to have many more drives than you’d get with a bare metal server. I have many OVH and Hetzner servers (cloud and dedicated) but not sure I’d find a use for this.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > The thing you pay for with cloud servers is not having to do the up-keep of the host machine. That's what you pay public cloud service providers for, but private clouds are considered to be a thing as well. https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/private-cloud/ https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/private-cloud/
  - eddythompson80 3y ago
    But the reason you go with private cloud is because you want to give developers in your organization the ease of use and velocity of their peers using the public cloud, while footing the bill to pay far far more than you would have paid to any public cloud. Essentially, private cloud is for deep pocket organizations (some Fortune 500, governments, militaries, etc). No one is running a private cloud for a small startup. The closest you'd get to a "private cloud" is a bunch of servers running a kubernetes (or swarm) cluster.
    - freeopinion 3y ago
      If I can open an app, spin up some VMs, pipeline a deployment to them and extend my operational footprint in 10 minutes, I'm not sure I care whether you want to call that cloud or not. I've seen that in some pretty small environments.
      - ransackdev 3y ago
        Yeah honestly some ipmi, cloudinit and (insert config management flavor of the week here) has been spinning up “private clouds” for decades with ease in large shops and in single server shops. We’ve had private clouds since the first person ran ssh commands against someone else’s dedicated metal in some dc. The cloud is just “someone else’s computer”, not “someone else’s commercially available aws compatible api suite of service offerings that is operating against someone else’s computer”
    - rhaway84773 3y ago
      Isn’t that the case now because setting up a private cloud is complicated and expensive? If setting up a private cloud was as easy as running a couple of scripts making it easily accessible to a small business without a large dedicated IT dept why wouldn’t small businesses not want to save money with that private cloud?
    - sofixa 3y ago
      > But the reason you go with private cloud is because you want to give developers in your organization the ease of use and velocity of their peers using the public cloud, while footing the bill to pay far far more than you would have paid to any public cloud. Not really. "Far more" would be extremely dependent on each specific scenario. Managing your own hardware, if you have the skills and upfront capital for it, can be drastically cheaper, especially if you need lots of storage/compute/networking/GPUs.
- hardwaresofton 3y ago
  If you’d be interested in cutting down on upkeep I’m actually running a service thats fully managed services on clouds like Hetzner[0]. Full disclosure the management plane is not open source but I've already got support for a couple services and am working on some more. Mind if I reach out? I'd love to get you to kick the tires. [0]: https://nimbusws.com https://nimbusws.com
  - bashy 3y ago
    We mainly run game servers - not sure how helpful that would be.
    - hardwaresofton 3y ago
      Ahh I thought there might be some auxiliary services you need to run — do you run anything like prometheus instances or analytics or anything like that?
  - unmole 3y ago
    Link to the full services list is broken.
    - hardwaresofton 3y ago
      Ah thanks for pointing this out!
Cantinflas 3y ago
>Available on GitHub under the Elastic v2 license. So... not open source?
- 38 3y ago
  normally I give "open source" comments like this the label they deserve, which is "troll". however in this case it seems justified: > You may not move, change, disable, or circumvent the license key functionality in the software, and you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software that is protected by the license key. https://elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license https://elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license
  - pwmtr 3y ago
    I work on Ubicloud. It is fair criticism. We don't claim to be "open source" rather we are open and free as in you can see the code and host it yourself if you want. The primary restriction is that license does not allow building a managed service out of it. BTW, we don't have any license key, so that part of the Elastic License wouldn't apply. It is there, because we wanted to use a known license that fits the bill instead of creating our own obscure license.
    - 38 3y ago
      using "free and open" is going to evoke the idea of FOSS. so you either: 1. did that intentionally, intending to trick people into thinking UbiCloud is FOSS 2. did it unintentionally, somehow missing the obvious connection that people are going to make either way, its a bad look. this is a solved problem, you can use the correct term for the situation: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
      - zxwrt 3y ago
        Agree. Using "free and open" is still rather deceptive.
      - 3y ago
revskill 3y ago
Interesting choice on Ruby. Why Ruby in first place ?
- joshmn 3y ago
  Why not?
  - sigmonsays 3y ago
    top three reasons to not use ruby for me are: 1. it's not compiled and evaluated at runtime, which make it harder to test. Pesky undefined variables in edge case code.. 2. deployment is tough when it's a ton of small files. Most things compile to a single executable binary 3. it's not concurrent or parallel easily. You're not going to easily use all your cores and also develop sane software.
    - lockhouse 3y ago
      If I'm not mistaken, the vast majority of web app backends are written in interpreted languages like Ruby, such as PHP, Python, JavaScript, and Perl. For example, Github, Shopify, and Hulu were written with Ruby on Rails and they seem to do alright.
      - senorrib 3y ago
        "All right" is a stretch. Shopify employs a lot of amazing compiler engineers to constantly evolve the ruby compiler/VM to squeeze as much performance as possible without affecting the regular engineers, something most startups cannot do.
        firecall 3y ago
        That's true of many companies at scale though. :-) Some of the work on Ruby and Rails that Shopify and Github have produced is available to the community as well. For instance: https://github.blog/2022-08-25-introducing-trilogy-a-new-database-adapter-for-ruby-on-rails/ https://github.blog/2022-08-25-introducing-trilogy-a-new-dat... Facebook heavily use, or did use, PHP dont they? IIRC the Threads backend is Python as well. Which seems to be doing OK!
elitan 3y ago
Is there a demo available?
- pwmtr 3y ago
  You can check out our managed service to get a feel at https://console.ubicloud.com https://console.ubicloud.com
  - BilalBudhani 3y ago
    I registered by never received account confirmation email.
    - ozgune 3y ago
      Thanks for noting this. We use Postmark to send emails and we apparently ran out of our monthly email limit after hitting HN. We just upgraded our plan; and this should now work. If it doesn't, please feel to directly ping us at support @ ubicloud.com.
rafaelturk 3y ago
love this.. we've in the process of leaving the traditional cloud powered by microk8s
- Cwizard 3y ago
  Could you elaborate a bit on my you are leaving microk8s?
  - rafaelturk 3y ago
    We're leaving AWS EKS to Microk8s. Our final setup will be microk8s + cloudflare tunnel acting as our cdn
  - ochoseis 3y ago
    I’m confused too, but perhaps they mean the move itself is powered by microk8s?
mdaniel 3y ago
https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud#how-is-this-different-than-openstack https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud#how-is-this-different-t... was my immediate question, although they left off "and the license is different" but I guess that's implied As for the "as a managed service" part, I believe Open Metal (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35087879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35087879 ) is trying to fill in that gap with actual open source software I cannot speak to the "6 key services in GA form in the next two years" aspiration since I don't know what the other 3 are that you're going after in order to know how impactful they'll be
- stevage 3y ago
  Thanks, came here for this question (difference from OpenStack).
  - fdr 3y ago
    I work on it. Quite a few differences. Different business theory, different development theory...and, unavoidably, different era, all which change the likely "feel" of the project as it matures. To my mind, the biggest alteration is who does changes, and why: unless people show a lot (really, a surprising level) of code contribution interest, substantially, Ubicloud staff will make the changes and collect bugs from hosting the software in production. This, alone, is a big departure from how OpenStack has evolved. It was my experience that engineering staff assessing bugs in hosted software they had design responsibility for gave it much of its distinctness. OpenStack's main contributions seems to be consortia in the system integrator space. This distance between operation and design changes makes a big difference in how a project shakes out. There are some ramifications: one, is that more administratively complex services, like databases, tend to be out of scope for OpenStack, but in-scope for us. Secondly, OpenStack has an interest in broadening the number of mechanisms to support one kind of functionality, to handle varied and complex enterprise installations (that purchase service contracts). We are probably much more cautious about doing this, instead preferring one implementation that covers our target platforms well...and as simply as possible. Finally, there's era. It's somewhat unavoidable. For example, you would not design a system around IPv6 network underlays in 2010 (OpenStack's formative years), but you might in 2023 (as we did). This simplifies things. You couldn't use SPDK (established 2015, and you might have been brave to rely on it at inception) to have a gentler ramp to implement more advanced block device support and decide: "that's the implementation, unless we replace it totally." Many useful kernel features were developed between 2010 and 2023. Systemd is an obligate dependency of ours, and it has a lot of connections to the more advanced cgroups and namespace feature of Linux...and, brand new in 2010. Bare metal providers were not as advanced in 2010. And so on. Path dependency is inevitable, and we will have a different one, and that will make it a very different device. So, I haven't written much about what the project "is," but perhaps allowing you to anticipate how it "will be." And why some people found it worth their while to start building it.
pwmtr 3y ago
Disclaimer: I work on Ubicloud. Wow, it is exciting to see what we are working on at HN. We only shared it with our professional circle so far, but it seems it found its way to HN . Happy to answer any questions, but in summary we are building an open cloud, an alternative to existing hyperscalers, because we believe that you shouldn't have to give up power and lock yourself in to be able to have the ease of use of cloud. You can use the managed version of Ubicloud or you can host it yourself. You can also use any bare metal provider such as Hetzner or OVH (currently we only support Hetzner because... well.. we are just starting , and support for other providers are on the way), thus benefit from their low prices and many available locations.
- alsjdfnasljfkh 3y ago
  [flagged]
- esperent 3y ago
  I think you could improve this section of the Readme to make this more accessible: > 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 have an ephemeral workload like a CI/CD pipeline (we're integrating with GitHub Actions), or you'd like to run compute/memory heavy tests. Our managed cloud is ~3x cheaper than AWS, so you save on costs. > You want a portable and simple app deployment service like MRSK. We're moving Ubicloud's control plane from Heroku to MRSK; and we want to provide open and portable services for MRSK's dependencies in the process. > You have bare metal machines sitting somewhere. You'd like to build your own cloud for portability, security, or compliance reasons. This seems needlessly wordy. Instead you might assume that readers already have expertise or can look up terms themselves and simply list like this: Currently Available Features * CI/CD * MRSK app deployment * Etc. Coming soon * X * Y * Z * Etc.
  - pwmtr 3y ago
    Thanks for the feedback. We iterated few times on our README already and we will iterate on it many more times. These will definitely come in handy.
iFire 3y ago
Elastic License https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud/blob/main/LICENSE
Too 3y ago
How does this compare to kubernetes? It’s hard to grasp what is really part of the package. Is it a control plane? A list of curated services integrated together? An abstraction layer over hetzner? I can’t really tell.
jwildeboer 3y ago
It’s not open source, AFAICS? It is under the Elastic License, which is not an open source license as it limits use? „ You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software.“
- hypercube33 3y ago
  Also the name invokes "Ubiquity" the networking company.
  - mcny 3y ago
    Just to be clear, we are talking about Ubiquiti. I am not fancy enough to own it's hardware but I like the android and iPhone app for Wi-Fi man which is an easy to use Internet speed testing thing for Android and iPhone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquiti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquiti
- 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
  oh boy. it is not "open source" but it certainly free software
  - stingraycharles 3y ago
    Wasn’t “free software” the kind of “free, as in speech” thing? E.g. “free software foundation”. But yeah I find this kind of comments always overly negative, when there’s an organization giving something away.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      Sort of, but this kind of giving away often means you cannot use it at all because using anything not unencumbered is blocked by default.
- lionkor 3y ago
  This is what happens when teams/companies dont know AGPL-3.0 - it would solve this issue almost entirely. Anyone building a competing product that is better would have to agree to publish their improvements.
ody4242 3y ago
What makes you stand out from this list of other managed openstack providers? https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/public-clouds/ https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/public-clouds/
smartbit 3y ago
spdk seems like an environmental unfriendly decision given the 100% cpu [0] that the user-space polling requires. For me a no go. Did you consider alternatives? [0] https://spdk.io/doc/spdk_top.html https://spdk.io/doc/spdk_top.html
- FranGro78 3y ago
  Do you suppose the elastic block stores of the public cloud providers operate in a non polling manner? The incredibly low level of latency and high levels of iops preclude having it be based on software interrupts, I think even in scenarios where sr-iov is available to the hyper visor.
  - fdr 3y ago
    Yes, SPDK for us sits on adjacent to the VM however, so our use of it for now can be best compared to an alternative to specialized PCIe hardware operating in pass-through mode directly to guests (e.g. AWS Nitro), with enough industry heft to (in the case of AWS especially, and GCP more recently via a probably-Intel collaboration) to get guests to have drivers for those cards. You can see this in action in the Linux drivers for ena (aws) and gve (google). This is how the usual suspects get past software interrupts adjacent to the VMM, on the "client" side of things. Getting the driver stack integrated into Linux is no small task and letting it percolate into distributions in common use is necessarily a slow process. SPDK permits getting decent performance and gradual deepening of our functionality while still relying on virtio, which has already percolated. As I understand it, on the storage side, these cards tend to expose an NVMe interface which is somewhat generic, so you don't see the same kind of driver siloing there. There's a related bit of SPDK and hypervisor functionality, vfio-user (vs vhost-user), but we elected not to use it at this time. They both use a similar shared-memory transport. Azure is an interesting outlier, a large one, in that their reliance on Mellanox (a subsidiary of nvidia) drivers is documented, so they could be considered in a partnership to achieve the same aim. So you could read the mlx drivers in the same fashion as ena and gve. I've been watching the technology "vdpa" with some interest to have a shot to also provide pass-through PCIe devices to the guest that do not add such a driver dependency so far outside our ability to influence: Microsoft is going to have a bit more equal a relationship with nvidia than we would as it comes to problematic changes in the Mellanox drivers. But I suspect it'll be some years before that can possibly happen, if it happens at all. It's not easy to get a Connect-X 6 DX card, for example. So, there are many problems for the foreseeable future trying to get into hardware, though I'd like to avoid precluding it. I liked this blog post in getting a feel for this, but in brief, they're computers plugged into computers: https://www.servethehome.com/zfs-without-a-server-using-the-nvidia-bluefield-2-dpu-nvme-arm-aic-iscsi/ https://www.servethehome.com/zfs-without-a-server-using-the-.... Our alternative is to carve off a core or two instead of plugging a computer into the computer. Maybe at some future time...I suspect, no sooner than five years from now, but probably, should it come to pass, quite a bit later...there will be some commonality and availability in such PCIe cards and Ubicloud or something like it could consider a tangible development theory around them.
BilalBudhani 3y ago
what are you using under the hood for cloudifying?
vero2 3y ago
A sincere best of luck to you all. At the same time these sentences are unwarranted > Public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud 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 alternative, reduces your costs, and returns control of your infrastructure back to you. All without sacrificing the cloud's convenience. especially when you say: > Ubicloud is in public alpha. You can provide us your feedback, get help, or ask us to support your network environment in the Community Forum. while I agree self-hosting at a philosophical level, please note that there are lots of good reasons to use public providers.

212 points by dkgs1998 3y ago

The thing you pay for with cloud servers is not having to do the up-keep of the host machine. They tend to have many more drives than you’d get with a bare metal server. I have many OVH and Hetzner servers (cloud and dedicated) but not sure I’d find a use for this.

CharlesW 3y ago
> The thing you pay for with cloud servers is not having to do the up-keep of the host machine. That's what you pay public cloud service providers for, but private clouds are considered to be a thing as well. https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/private-cloud/ https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/private-cloud/
- eddythompson80 3y ago
  But the reason you go with private cloud is because you want to give developers in your organization the ease of use and velocity of their peers using the public cloud, while footing the bill to pay far far more than you would have paid to any public cloud. Essentially, private cloud is for deep pocket organizations (some Fortune 500, governments, militaries, etc). No one is running a private cloud for a small startup. The closest you'd get to a "private cloud" is a bunch of servers running a kubernetes (or swarm) cluster.
  - freeopinion 3y ago
    If I can open an app, spin up some VMs, pipeline a deployment to them and extend my operational footprint in 10 minutes, I'm not sure I care whether you want to call that cloud or not. I've seen that in some pretty small environments.
    - ransackdev 3y ago
      Yeah honestly some ipmi, cloudinit and (insert config management flavor of the week here) has been spinning up “private clouds” for decades with ease in large shops and in single server shops. We’ve had private clouds since the first person ran ssh commands against someone else’s dedicated metal in some dc. The cloud is just “someone else’s computer”, not “someone else’s commercially available aws compatible api suite of service offerings that is operating against someone else’s computer”
  - rhaway84773 3y ago
    Isn’t that the case now because setting up a private cloud is complicated and expensive? If setting up a private cloud was as easy as running a couple of scripts making it easily accessible to a small business without a large dedicated IT dept why wouldn’t small businesses not want to save money with that private cloud?
  - sofixa 3y ago
    > But the reason you go with private cloud is because you want to give developers in your organization the ease of use and velocity of their peers using the public cloud, while footing the bill to pay far far more than you would have paid to any public cloud. Not really. "Far more" would be extremely dependent on each specific scenario. Managing your own hardware, if you have the skills and upfront capital for it, can be drastically cheaper, especially if you need lots of storage/compute/networking/GPUs.
hardwaresofton 3y ago
If you’d be interested in cutting down on upkeep I’m actually running a service thats fully managed services on clouds like Hetzner[0]. Full disclosure the management plane is not open source but I've already got support for a couple services and am working on some more. Mind if I reach out? I'd love to get you to kick the tires. [0]: https://nimbusws.com https://nimbusws.com
- bashy 3y ago
  We mainly run game servers - not sure how helpful that would be.
  - hardwaresofton 3y ago
    Ahh I thought there might be some auxiliary services you need to run — do you run anything like prometheus instances or analytics or anything like that?
- unmole 3y ago
  Link to the full services list is broken.
  - hardwaresofton 3y ago
    Ah thanks for pointing this out!

Cantinflas 3y ago

>Available on GitHub under the Elastic v2 license. So... not open source?

38 3y ago
normally I give "open source" comments like this the label they deserve, which is "troll". however in this case it seems justified: > You may not move, change, disable, or circumvent the license key functionality in the software, and you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software that is protected by the license key. https://elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license https://elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license
- pwmtr 3y ago
  I work on Ubicloud. It is fair criticism. We don't claim to be "open source" rather we are open and free as in you can see the code and host it yourself if you want. The primary restriction is that license does not allow building a managed service out of it. BTW, we don't have any license key, so that part of the Elastic License wouldn't apply. It is there, because we wanted to use a known license that fits the bill instead of creating our own obscure license.
  - 38 3y ago
    using "free and open" is going to evoke the idea of FOSS. so you either: 1. did that intentionally, intending to trick people into thinking UbiCloud is FOSS 2. did it unintentionally, somehow missing the obvious connection that people are going to make either way, its a bad look. this is a solved problem, you can use the correct term for the situation: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
    - zxwrt 3y ago
      Agree. Using "free and open" is still rather deceptive.
    - 3y ago

revskill 3y ago

Interesting choice on Ruby. Why Ruby in first place ?

joshmn 3y ago
Why not?
- sigmonsays 3y ago
  top three reasons to not use ruby for me are: 1. it's not compiled and evaluated at runtime, which make it harder to test. Pesky undefined variables in edge case code.. 2. deployment is tough when it's a ton of small files. Most things compile to a single executable binary 3. it's not concurrent or parallel easily. You're not going to easily use all your cores and also develop sane software.
  - lockhouse 3y ago
    If I'm not mistaken, the vast majority of web app backends are written in interpreted languages like Ruby, such as PHP, Python, JavaScript, and Perl. For example, Github, Shopify, and Hulu were written with Ruby on Rails and they seem to do alright.
    - senorrib 3y ago
      "All right" is a stretch. Shopify employs a lot of amazing compiler engineers to constantly evolve the ruby compiler/VM to squeeze as much performance as possible without affecting the regular engineers, something most startups cannot do.
      - firecall 3y ago
        That's true of many companies at scale though. :-) Some of the work on Ruby and Rails that Shopify and Github have produced is available to the community as well. For instance: https://github.blog/2022-08-25-introducing-trilogy-a-new-database-adapter-for-ruby-on-rails/ https://github.blog/2022-08-25-introducing-trilogy-a-new-dat... Facebook heavily use, or did use, PHP dont they? IIRC the Threads backend is Python as well. Which seems to be doing OK!

elitan 3y ago

Is there a demo available?

pwmtr 3y ago
You can check out our managed service to get a feel at https://console.ubicloud.com https://console.ubicloud.com
- BilalBudhani 3y ago
  I registered by never received account confirmation email.
  - ozgune 3y ago
    Thanks for noting this. We use Postmark to send emails and we apparently ran out of our monthly email limit after hitting HN. We just upgraded our plan; and this should now work. If it doesn't, please feel to directly ping us at support @ ubicloud.com.

rafaelturk 3y ago

love this.. we've in the process of leaving the traditional cloud powered by microk8s

Cwizard 3y ago
Could you elaborate a bit on my you are leaving microk8s?
- rafaelturk 3y ago
  We're leaving AWS EKS to Microk8s. Our final setup will be microk8s + cloudflare tunnel acting as our cdn
- ochoseis 3y ago
  I’m confused too, but perhaps they mean the move itself is powered by microk8s?

mdaniel 3y ago

https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud#how-is-this-different-than-openstack https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud#how-is-this-different-t... was my immediate question, although they left off "and the license is different" but I guess that's implied As for the "as a managed service" part, I believe Open Metal (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35087879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35087879 ) is trying to fill in that gap with actual open source software I cannot speak to the "6 key services in GA form in the next two years" aspiration since I don't know what the other 3 are that you're going after in order to know how impactful they'll be

stevage 3y ago
Thanks, came here for this question (difference from OpenStack).
- fdr 3y ago
  I work on it. Quite a few differences. Different business theory, different development theory...and, unavoidably, different era, all which change the likely "feel" of the project as it matures. To my mind, the biggest alteration is who does changes, and why: unless people show a lot (really, a surprising level) of code contribution interest, substantially, Ubicloud staff will make the changes and collect bugs from hosting the software in production. This, alone, is a big departure from how OpenStack has evolved. It was my experience that engineering staff assessing bugs in hosted software they had design responsibility for gave it much of its distinctness. OpenStack's main contributions seems to be consortia in the system integrator space. This distance between operation and design changes makes a big difference in how a project shakes out. There are some ramifications: one, is that more administratively complex services, like databases, tend to be out of scope for OpenStack, but in-scope for us. Secondly, OpenStack has an interest in broadening the number of mechanisms to support one kind of functionality, to handle varied and complex enterprise installations (that purchase service contracts). We are probably much more cautious about doing this, instead preferring one implementation that covers our target platforms well...and as simply as possible. Finally, there's era. It's somewhat unavoidable. For example, you would not design a system around IPv6 network underlays in 2010 (OpenStack's formative years), but you might in 2023 (as we did). This simplifies things. You couldn't use SPDK (established 2015, and you might have been brave to rely on it at inception) to have a gentler ramp to implement more advanced block device support and decide: "that's the implementation, unless we replace it totally." Many useful kernel features were developed between 2010 and 2023. Systemd is an obligate dependency of ours, and it has a lot of connections to the more advanced cgroups and namespace feature of Linux...and, brand new in 2010. Bare metal providers were not as advanced in 2010. And so on. Path dependency is inevitable, and we will have a different one, and that will make it a very different device. So, I haven't written much about what the project "is," but perhaps allowing you to anticipate how it "will be." And why some people found it worth their while to start building it.

pwmtr 3y ago

Disclaimer: I work on Ubicloud. Wow, it is exciting to see what we are working on at HN. We only shared it with our professional circle so far, but it seems it found its way to HN . Happy to answer any questions, but in summary we are building an open cloud, an alternative to existing hyperscalers, because we believe that you shouldn't have to give up power and lock yourself in to be able to have the ease of use of cloud. You can use the managed version of Ubicloud or you can host it yourself. You can also use any bare metal provider such as Hetzner or OVH (currently we only support Hetzner because... well.. we are just starting , and support for other providers are on the way), thus benefit from their low prices and many available locations.

alsjdfnasljfkh 3y ago
[flagged]
esperent 3y ago
I think you could improve this section of the Readme to make this more accessible: > 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 have an ephemeral workload like a CI/CD pipeline (we're integrating with GitHub Actions), or you'd like to run compute/memory heavy tests. Our managed cloud is ~3x cheaper than AWS, so you save on costs. > You want a portable and simple app deployment service like MRSK. We're moving Ubicloud's control plane from Heroku to MRSK; and we want to provide open and portable services for MRSK's dependencies in the process. > You have bare metal machines sitting somewhere. You'd like to build your own cloud for portability, security, or compliance reasons. This seems needlessly wordy. Instead you might assume that readers already have expertise or can look up terms themselves and simply list like this: Currently Available Features * CI/CD * MRSK app deployment * Etc. Coming soon * X * Y * Z * Etc.
- pwmtr 3y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. We iterated few times on our README already and we will iterate on it many more times. These will definitely come in handy.

iFire 3y ago

Elastic License https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud/blob/main/LICENSE

Too 3y ago

How does this compare to kubernetes? It’s hard to grasp what is really part of the package. Is it a control plane? A list of curated services integrated together? An abstraction layer over hetzner? I can’t really tell.

jwildeboer 3y ago

It’s not open source, AFAICS? It is under the Elastic License, which is not an open source license as it limits use? „ You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software.“

hypercube33 3y ago
Also the name invokes "Ubiquity" the networking company.
- mcny 3y ago
  Just to be clear, we are talking about Ubiquiti. I am not fancy enough to own it's hardware but I like the android and iPhone app for Wi-Fi man which is an easy to use Internet speed testing thing for Android and iPhone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquiti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquiti
2Gkashmiri 3y ago
oh boy. it is not "open source" but it certainly free software
- stingraycharles 3y ago
  Wasn’t “free software” the kind of “free, as in speech” thing? E.g. “free software foundation”. But yeah I find this kind of comments always overly negative, when there’s an organization giving something away.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    Sort of, but this kind of giving away often means you cannot use it at all because using anything not unencumbered is blocked by default.
lionkor 3y ago
This is what happens when teams/companies dont know AGPL-3.0 - it would solve this issue almost entirely. Anyone building a competing product that is better would have to agree to publish their improvements.

ody4242 3y ago

What makes you stand out from this list of other managed openstack providers? https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/public-clouds/ https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/public-clouds/

smartbit 3y ago

spdk seems like an environmental unfriendly decision given the 100% cpu [0] that the user-space polling requires. For me a no go. Did you consider alternatives? [0] https://spdk.io/doc/spdk_top.html https://spdk.io/doc/spdk_top.html

FranGro78 3y ago
Do you suppose the elastic block stores of the public cloud providers operate in a non polling manner? The incredibly low level of latency and high levels of iops preclude having it be based on software interrupts, I think even in scenarios where sr-iov is available to the hyper visor.
- fdr 3y ago
  Yes, SPDK for us sits on adjacent to the VM however, so our use of it for now can be best compared to an alternative to specialized PCIe hardware operating in pass-through mode directly to guests (e.g. AWS Nitro), with enough industry heft to (in the case of AWS especially, and GCP more recently via a probably-Intel collaboration) to get guests to have drivers for those cards. You can see this in action in the Linux drivers for ena (aws) and gve (google). This is how the usual suspects get past software interrupts adjacent to the VMM, on the "client" side of things. Getting the driver stack integrated into Linux is no small task and letting it percolate into distributions in common use is necessarily a slow process. SPDK permits getting decent performance and gradual deepening of our functionality while still relying on virtio, which has already percolated. As I understand it, on the storage side, these cards tend to expose an NVMe interface which is somewhat generic, so you don't see the same kind of driver siloing there. There's a related bit of SPDK and hypervisor functionality, vfio-user (vs vhost-user), but we elected not to use it at this time. They both use a similar shared-memory transport. Azure is an interesting outlier, a large one, in that their reliance on Mellanox (a subsidiary of nvidia) drivers is documented, so they could be considered in a partnership to achieve the same aim. So you could read the mlx drivers in the same fashion as ena and gve. I've been watching the technology "vdpa" with some interest to have a shot to also provide pass-through PCIe devices to the guest that do not add such a driver dependency so far outside our ability to influence: Microsoft is going to have a bit more equal a relationship with nvidia than we would as it comes to problematic changes in the Mellanox drivers. But I suspect it'll be some years before that can possibly happen, if it happens at all. It's not easy to get a Connect-X 6 DX card, for example. So, there are many problems for the foreseeable future trying to get into hardware, though I'd like to avoid precluding it. I liked this blog post in getting a feel for this, but in brief, they're computers plugged into computers: https://www.servethehome.com/zfs-without-a-server-using-the-nvidia-bluefield-2-dpu-nvme-arm-aic-iscsi/ https://www.servethehome.com/zfs-without-a-server-using-the-.... Our alternative is to carve off a core or two instead of plugging a computer into the computer. Maybe at some future time...I suspect, no sooner than five years from now, but probably, should it come to pass, quite a bit later...there will be some commonality and availability in such PCIe cards and Ubicloud or something like it could consider a tangible development theory around them.

BilalBudhani 3y ago

what are you using under the hood for cloudifying?

vero2 3y ago

A sincere best of luck to you all. At the same time these sentences are unwarranted > Public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud 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 alternative, reduces your costs, and returns control of your infrastructure back to you. All without sacrificing the cloud's convenience. especially when you say: > Ubicloud is in public alpha. You can provide us your feedback, get help, or ask us to support your network environment in the Community Forum. while I agree self-hosting at a philosophical level, please note that there are lots of good reasons to use public providers.