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 set it up yourself on these providers or you can use our managed service.
Are all the bits and pieces necessary for starting one's own managed service open source? In case somebody is interested in starting their own commercial cloud. How easy would that be to deploy?
There's OpenStack. It's a private IaaS. Had loadbalancers, ipv6 support, support for K8s hosting via the magnum component (and other container orchestrators), HA via Masakari component. The networking is very flexible. It does not currently have functions as a service, I believe that was in the Senlin component, but that's been abandoned, I believe a new incarnation of the idea is in the works though. With something like Kolla-ansible a containerized OpenStack infrastructure is pretty damn easy to manage, upgrades are just making sure you make any needded changes in the global config file (just a vimdiff with the new sample one included in the release) and then literally just a kolla-ansible upgrade -i inventory-file.yml.
I'm just a home labber and I've run OpenStack via kolla-ansible for like 7 years now, and Ceph since the jewel release I think almost 8 years ago for storage. Both are pretty easy to manage.
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.
Sounds like a great value for those who don’t want to involve with k8s. As you integrate with Hetzner and their new billing system (not charging monthly anymore) is making your service more useful.
what about: 'Cheaper doesn't mean slower'? It's pithier, and (in particular for anyone reading before/without looking at the page) better IMO in its place as a subheading. Scans better. Or even 'Cheaper != slower' (again, subhead).
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.
> 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.