As a side note, and to pg's point, Microsoft did make some very smart Web 2.0 acquisitions from Silicon Valley in the years since --most notably LinkedIn and Github--, and let them run relatively independently.
> So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it:
Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups. They could get substantially all of them for less than they'd have to pay for Facebook.
>Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.
There is indeed a large gap in the market between outsourcing all your infrastructure to Hyperscalers vs. hosting it on DIY-bare-metal and/or VPC providers. An open source alternative to AWS would do much to fill that gap, and we are building just that at Ubicloud (I'm one of the co-founders).
So far with Ubicloud, you get virtual machines, load balancers, private networking, managed PostgreSQL, all with encryption at rest and in-transit. The Ubicloud managed service uses Hetzner bare metal as one of its hosting providers, which cuts costs 2x - 10x compared to AWS/Azure. Would love to hear any feedback if you'd like to give it a try, or go through the repo here: https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud
You can think of Ubicloud as software that takes bare metal servers as its input, and provides VMs and other cloud infrastructure services as its output. You can self-host Ubicloud on your own hardware, or use it as a managed service.
Comments below are on point: Compared to OpenStack, Ubicloud is simpler, comes with a managed service that you can use in minutes (vs days/weeks), and provides more services such as managed databases.
Compared to Kubernetes, Ubicloud covers layers both above and below Kubernetes. For example, running K8s on AWS/Azure/GCP depends on having VMs where the pods can run on. Similarly, running a managed database service on K8s requires much more than the basic K8s service itself.
Put differently, all major cloud providers have proprietary software similar in purpose to Ubicloud, which they use to provide their core cloud services. Using AWS as an example, services like EC2, RDS for managed Postgres, or EKS for managed Kubernetes, all run on this type of software. Ubicloud makes this software open source, and allows it to run anywhere--not just on AWS data centers.
Thanks and yes, the magnitude of it was surprising to us, and that for a common use-case. The default runners you get for Github Actions if you are compiling ARM code is x86, which uses qemu emulation. That default is 10x slower vs native ARM.
Combined also with 10x higher prices, a 100x price-perf gain vs the default was unusual.
That’s great to hear, thank you! Please feel free to email us if you have questions. For pricing, the first link is for VMs, and the second is for managed database instances, which also have 5x more disk. You’re right in that we should aggregate and better present our pricing.
Thank you! Quick notes:
- Resizing instances after provisioning is a manual operation for now. We'd use the same backup machinery that exists to automate it; until then you could do it manually or we're happy to help through a support request.
- Yes, you can create multiple databases per instance.
- We don't support pgvector yet; initial extensions we have are those in contrib, with more to come.
- Going through a VM to fetch the data from/send data to file store is the most common
- We take backups automatically, with point-in-time-recovery available to the minute. We also allow you to "fork" a database using a similar approach: i.e. your database remains intact; you just add a new database to it from a past point in time (typically useful for dev, test and/or analytics)
We also have a talk that one of our core team members gave earlier today at PGConf.EU that goes through some of the inner workings of our managed service. Its video is not posted yet given it's been just several hours, but should be available here once ready:
Right now, we have an early block store (EBS) that is non-replicated, and that we are testing and using internally. Over time, we will expose it as a service as well. But object store (S3) will come first.
Yes, ack on both. We already do point-in-time-restore your database with 1-minute granularity. And the docs are thin currently; we will add more to them.
We're using the same core control plane approach that still powers multiple PostgreSQL services like Heroku Postgres, Citus/Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL and Crunchy Bridge. Ubicloud is being built by core members of the same teams that built those products, improved with learnings. We are yet in preview and not as feature complete, but we will continue adding more features, building them in the open.
Ah, I see. The key part above is "to third parties". If you're using ubicloud to provide a managed/hosted service for yourself, or your company, that's wonderful. You could even be a massive organization and do that. It's just that you are not providing the managed service to other parties such as your customers - essentially, that you're not a hosting provider re-selling the software.
It means that our source code is open and transparent to all of our users. You can use it for free, modify it, or even re-distribute it - the main restriction is that you are not offering it as a managed service to third parties.
If you have a particular use-case in mind that you need but feel is limited, please let us know. Happy to talk through it and see how we can help.
> So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it: Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups. They could get substantially all of them for less than they'd have to pay for Facebook.
>Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.