- Ubicloud aims to provide an open source alternative to AWS by offering core cloud computing services on affordable bare-metal servers.
- The focus is currently on compute, PostgreSQL database service, networking capabilities, with plans to add block storage and Kubernetes-based container service.
- Co-founders have experience with Citus Data and Azure, and the company recently raised a $16 million seed round.
Don’t we already have OpenStack? Something, something OpenStack complicated, something, something. Sounds a bit like raison d’étre.
I was just about to say, isn’t this just OpenStack?
I don’t even think OpenStack is needlessly complicated.
Yes, it is complicated, but who thinks operating a cloud environment the equivalent of AWS is trivial?
What an awful name: I immediately thought it might be related to Ubisoft and had to look it up to sanity check my feeling of absolute revulsion. Such a good idea but the sentiment of that name won’t do it any favors.
And I thought it was Ubiquiti’s cloud platform I’d never heard of.
Such an unfortunate name choice. 🤦
Ubicloud seems to be reselling Hetzner with a 60% profit margin.
Each VM has a monthly egress quota of 0.625TB per 2 vCPUs. If you exceed this limit, we will charge you $3 per TB of egress traffic. We don’t charge for ingress traffic or traffic between your resources within the same cloud region.
Hetzner has a limit of 20 TB, this means Ubicloud has an initial potential profit margin of 15 TB (45$) in the worst case (standard-16 plan), and even better margins for the cheaper plans. Hetzner charges €1.21 for additional traffic outside their limit, this means Ubicloud still has a margin of 56% for additional traffic outside of the Hetzner limit.
It seems like this could be quite profitable if they manage to create an easy-to-use platform that attracts companies. The 16m investment might be worth it.
What does “open source” mean in this context? AWS is not software.
AWS is software. Just not something you can self host.
There already exist alternatives to AWS, like localstack, a local AWS for testing purposes, or the more mature openstack, which is designed for essentially running your own AWS at scale.
AWS offers a collection of services made from many systems running all sorts of different software working together. Which piece of software do they plan to make? Are they trying to make provisioning management software? Cause that’s called AWS Management Console. Are they trying to make compute resource provisioning and scaling software? Cause that’s called Amazon EC2. They can’t possibly think they’re going to recreate everything AWS offers.
