ubicloud: Build and Manage a Cloud on Bare Metal

Overview

Ubicloud is a cloud control plane that turns bare-metal servers into infrastructure services, including virtual machines, networking, block storage, firewalls, and load balancers. Teams can run it on supported providers or use the managed platform, aiming to reduce dependence on closed cloud platforms and gain more control over where infrastructure runs.

It is most relevant to developers and infrastructure teams comfortable operating cloud software and bare-metal machines. Unlike a general-purpose cloud with a broad catalog of services, Ubicloud takes an opinionated approach and currently focuses on a smaller set of core infrastructure capabilities.

Key Features

• Provisions virtual machines on Linux bare-metal servers using Cloud Hypervisor.
• Provides public and private IPv4 and IPv6 networking, with encrypted IPsec tunnels.
• Isolates customer VM networking with Linux namespaces and supports firewall and load-balancer features using nftables.
• Offers virtualized block storage through SPDK. The storage is non-replicated.
• Includes attribute-based access control for fine-grained resource permissions.
• Provides a Ruby control plane backed by PostgreSQL, with a web console.
• Can be used as a managed service or self-hosted on bare-metal providers.

Use Cases

• Infrastructure teams with bare-metal capacity: Turn leased or existing servers into a cloud environment while retaining control over deployment and operations.
• Developers running ephemeral workloads: Provision compute for CI pipelines or resource-heavy tests where the managed service's provider choices and pricing may fit.
• Organizations with portability or compliance needs: Operate infrastructure outside a single closed cloud provider and manage the underlying machines themselves.
• Teams evaluating a smaller cloud platform: Explore core compute, networking, and storage services without adopting the breadth and configuration choices of a larger cloud stack.

Project Facts

• Language: Ruby
• License: AGPL-3.0
• Stars: 12.3k
• Forks: 592
• Topics: bare-metal, cloud, github-actions, hosting, kubernetes, linux, managed-cloud, open, opensource, portable, postgresql, ruby
• Archived: No

Getting Started

For a local demo, clone the repository and start its Docker Compose services:

git clone https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud.git
cd ubicloud
./demo/generate_env
docker-compose -f demo/docker-compose.yml up

The demo console is available at localhost:3000. See the README for provider setup and instructions to cloudify bare-metal servers.

Considerations

• Self-hosting requires operating the control plane and preparing Linux bare-metal servers. The documented provider setup requires Hetzner credentials and an SSH key.
• Virtual machines are assigned IPv6 addresses by default. Users without IPv6 connectivity may need a VPN, tunnel broker, or provider IPv4 addresses.
• Block storage is explicitly non-replicated, so it does not provide built-in storage redundancy.
• The project is licensed under AGPL-3.0. Review its terms before modifying or distributing a deployment.
• The README describes a focused service set and identifies managed Kubernetes and monitoring as future work, rather than established offerings in that project description.