Introducing Unfurl Cloud
We are very excited to publicly release Unfurl Cloud, the first open-source cloud platform!
This started out a couple years ago as a crazy idea: open-source code is everywhere, there’s a burgeoning open data movement, so why not an open-source cloud? Let’s take the things that make open-source awesome – the ability to freely share, reuse, and fork code – to the next level and apply these principles to cloud services.
Usually if an idea is a bit obvious, then someone has tried it before; and if it is a bit crazy, those attempts probably failed and we learn something from them. But after some investigation it turns out barely anyone had explored this idea before… so here we are!
Fast-forward to today and our launch of Unfurl Cloud and the results of pursuing this vision. This journey has lead to something different from what you might expect. For one, its not a physical cloud like AWS or Google Cloud. We do not have our own data center filled with servers. Instead, it works with and on top of existing cloud providers and is agnostic about how you use and integrate their services.
We are launching a platform designed around our core technical insight: that we can obtain freely reusable cloud services if they can be mapped back to the code built them by secure, reproducible deployment processes.
Unfurl Cloud
This platform is Unfurl Cloud: a open-source platform for collaboratively developing cloud applications -– from code to deployment.
We’ve tightly integrated the best open source development tools into our platform, including GitLab, Terraform, and Ansible, as well as our own Unfurl deployment technology.
All configuration and processes are committed to Git repositories, so services built with Unfurl Cloud can be reproducible: easily deploy them onto your own cloud infrastructure. Unfurl Cloud provides two additional technologies for building a free and open cloud:
- Cloud Blueprints, our provider-independent Infrastructure-as-Code templates for building reproducible cloud services.
- Testbed Projects, where developers can collaborate on building these cloud services and publish APIs that other developers can freely use.
Our vision of a Free and Open cloud
Compute power in the cloud should be a ubiquitous commodity like electricity, and the software infrastructure that runs on it should be open-source.
In a free and open cloud:
- All components are open-source
- Services and infrastructure are available to all
- You can clone any service in the cloud and run it wherever you’d like.
We want to:
- Make it easy to deploy open-source software.
- Make to easy to collaborate on building and running cloud services.
- Enable business models for sustainable open source development.
You can read more about our vision here.
Let’s build a free and open cloud, together!
We’re a tiny team pursing a big vision. Everything we do is open-source and community-driven – what open source application and services would you like to see running in our cloud? Tell us and we will run them!
And if you think this is a cool idea, join us on Unfurl Cloud and help make this a reality!