Startup Ubicloud is looking to develop an open source cloud offering.
Ubicloud's offering will provide cloud computing services on top of bare-metal servers from existing providers such as OVHcloud, Leaseweb and AWS, TechCrunch reports.
Ubicloud plans to offer this as both a managed service and an open-source offering so customers can build their own cloud on the other bare-metal providers.
Bare-metal servers are machines used by only one organization - in this case, Ubicloud. The servers often require less preinstalled software than standard cloud computing instances. They also lack a hypervisor, making it easier to access the underlying hardware directly and optimize it for application performance.
For now, the company is focusing on compute and a PostgreSQL database service as well as the necessary networking capabilities to create virtual networks. Eventually, Ubicloud will add block storage and a Kubernetes-based container service.
According to Ubicloud, its platform can run the PostgreSQL relational database three times more cost-efficiently, and can perform similarly for virtual machines. Egress traffic, or network traffic sent from Ubicloud to external infrastructure such as on-premises servers, costs 30 times less than on competing clouds.
Ubicloud was co-founded by Ozgun Erdogan and Umur Cubukcu, who previously created Citrus Data which was acquired by Microsoft in 2019.
“We are absolutely big fans of the cloud," Cubukcu told TechCrunch. "At the same time, we’ve been in it for such a long time and we see where there’s actually ways to do it better, or do it simpler."
The startup hopes this can eventually provide an alternative to the standard hyperscaler cloud offerings, but based on open-source code. Cubukcu acknowledges that Ubicloud won't be able to replace the full breadth of AWS' offerings but can offer a key service at a lower price and with a simpler developer process.
Ubicloud is not the first company to attempt to be an open-source competitor to AWS and the like - most notably the OpenStack operating system. On this competition, Cubukcu argues that OpenStack, while open, needs an "army of people."
"It is a solution, but you don’t have, for example, a managed OpenStack-as-a-service, right? It’s too complicated for that, whereas, with Ubicloud, our managed service is available from day one. You sign up, you can start using it in two minutes.”
The startup raised $16 million during its seed round, which closed in early January. Investors include Y Combinator and 500 Emerging Europe, among others. The company has 10 employees and is split between San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Istanbul.
