Since k8s is very effective at running a bunch of containers across a few machines, it would appear to be exactly the correct thing to reach for. At this point, running a small k8s operation, with k3s or similar, has become so easy that I can't find a rational reason to look elsewhere for container "orchestration".
It was as much personal "taste" than anything, and I would describe the choice as similar to preferring JSON over XML.
For whatever reason, kubernetes just irritates me. I find it unpleasant to use. And I don't think I'm unique in that regard.
I feel the same. I feel like it's a me problem. I was able to build and run massive systems at scale and never used kubernetes. Then, all of a sudden, around 2020, any time I wanted to build or run or do anything at scale, everywhere said I should just use kubernetes. And then when I wanted to do anything with docker in production, not even at scale, everywhere said I should just use kubernetes.
Then there was a brief period around 2021 where everyone - even kubernetes fans - realised it was being used everywhere, even when it didn't need to be. "You don't need k8s" became a meme.
And now, here we are, again, lots of people saying "just use k8s for everything".
I've learned it enough to know how to use it and what I can do with it. I still prefer to use literally anything else apart from k8s when building, and the only time I've ever felt k8s has been really needed to solve a problem is when the business has said "we're using k8s, deal with it".
It's like the Javascript or WordPress of the infrastructure engineering world - it became the lazy answer, IMO. Or the me problem angle: I'm just an aged engineer moaning at having to learn new solutions to old problems.
I also re-investigated containerization - weighing Docker Swarm vs K3s - and settled on Docker Swarm.
I’ve hated it ever since. Swarm is a PITA to use and has all kinds of failure modes that are different than regular old Docker Compose.
I’ve considered migrating again - either to Kubernetes, or just back to plain Docker - but haven’t done it. Maybe I should look at Uncloud?
With k8s you write a bunch of manifests that are 70% repetitive boilerplate. But actually, there is something you need that cannot be achieved with pure manifest, so you reach for Kustomize. But Kustomize actually doesn't do what you want, so you need to convert the entire thing to Helm.
You also still need to spin up your k8s cluster, which itself consists of half a dozen pods just so you have something where you can run your service. Oh, you wanted your service to be accessible from outside the cluster? Well, you need to install an ingress controller in your cluster. Oh BTW, the nginx ingress controller is now deprecated, so you have to choose from a handful of alternatives, all of which have certain advantages and disadvantages, and none of which are ideal for all situations. Have fun choosing.
That’s not bad, but I want to spend more time trying new things or enjoying the results of my efforts than maintaining the underlying substrates. For that purpose, K8s is consistently too complicated for my own ends - and Uncloud looks to do exactly what I want.
And if you want to use more than one machine then you run `docker swarm init`, and you can keep using the Compose file you already have, almost unchanged.
It's not a K8s replacement, but I'm guessing for some people it would be enough and less effort than a full migration to Kubernetes (e.g. hobby projects).
If you have a service with a simple compose file, you can have a simple k8s manifest to do the same thing. Plenty of tools convert right between the two (incl kompose, which k8s literally hands you: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/tra...)
Frankly, you're messing up by including kustomize or helm at all in 80% of cases. Just write the (agreed on tedious boilerplate - the manifest format is not my cup of tea) yaml and be done with the problem.
And no - you don't need an ingress. Just spin up a nodeport service, and you have the literal identical experience to exposing ports with compose - it's just a port on the machines running the cluster (any of them - magic!).
You don't need to touch an ingress until you actually want external traffic using a specific hostname (and optionally tls), which is... the same as compose. And frankly - at that point you probably SHOULD be thinking about the actual tooling you're using to expose that, in the same way you would if you ran it manually in compose. And sure - arguably you could move to gateways now, but in no way is the ingress api deprecated. They very clearly state...
> "The Ingress API is generally available, and is subject to the stability guarantees for generally available APIs. The Kubernetes project has no plans to remove Ingress from Kubernetes."
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/ingr...
---
Plenty of valid complaints for K8s (yaml config boilerplate being a solid pick) but most of the rest of your comment is basically just FUD. The complexity scale for K8s CAN get a lot higher than docker. Some organizations convince themselves it should and make it very complex (debatably for sane reasons). For personal needs... Just run k3s (or minikube, or microk8s, or k3ds, or etc...) and write some yaml. It's at exactly the same complexity as docker compose, with a slightly more verbose syntax.
Honestly, it's not even as complex as configuring VMs in vsphere or citrix.
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/serv...
Might need to redefine the port range from 30000-32767. Actually, if you want to avoid the ingress abstraction and maybe want to run a regular web server container of your choice to act as it (maybe you just prefer a config file, maybe that's what your legacy software is built around, maybe you need/prefer Apache2, go figure), you'd probably want to be able to run it on 80 and 443. Or 3000 or 8080 for some other software, out of convenience and simplicity.
Depending on what kind of K8s distro you use, thankfully not insanely hard to change though: https://docs.k3s.io/cli/server#networking But again, that's kind of going against the grain.
As for grabbing 443 or 80, most distros support specifying the port in the service spec directly, and I don't think it needs to be in the range of the reserved nodeports (I've done this on k3s, worked fine last I checked, which is admittedly a few years ago now).
As you grow to more than a small number of exposed services, I think an ingress generally does make sense, just because you want to be able to give things persistent names. But you can run a LONG way on just nodeports.
And even after going with an ingress - the tooling here is pretty straight forward. MetalLB (load balancer) and nginx (ingress, reverse proxy) don't take a ton of time or configuration.
As someone who was around when something like a LAMP stack wasn't "legacy", I think it's genuinely less complicated to setup than those old configurations. Especially because once you get it right in the yaml once, recreating it is very, very easy.
The network is complicated by the overlay network, so "normal" troubleshooting tools aren't super helpful. Storage is complicated by k8s wanting to fling pods around so you need networked storage (or to pin the pods, which removes almost all of k8s' value). Databases are annoying on k8s without networked storage, so you usually run them outside the cluster and now you have to manage bare metal and k8s resources.
The manifests are largely fine, outside of some of the more abnormal resources like setting up the nginx ingress with certs.
Especially in-house on bare metal.
Was what i was responding to. It's not the app management that becomes a pain, it's the cluster management, lifecycle, platform API deprecations, etc.
You would not be able to operate hundreds or thousand of any nodes without operation complexlity and k8s helps you here a lot.
I have struggled to get things like this stood up and hit many footguns along the way
K3s is just a repackaged, simplified k8s distro. You get the same behavior and the same tools as you have any time you operate an on-premises k8s cluster, and these, in my experience, are somewhere between good and excellent. So I can't imagine what you have in mind here.
"It's still essentially adding few hundred thousand lines of code into your infrastructure"
Sure. And they're all there for a reason: it's what one needs to orchestrate containers via an API, as revealed by a vast horde of users and years of refinement.
The clear target of this project is a k8s-like experience for people who are already familiar with Docker and docker compose but don't want to spend the energy to learn a whole new thing for low stakes deployments.
A normal person wouldn't think 'hey lets use k8s for the low stakes deployment over here'.
I'm afraid I have to disappoint you
It seems that way but in reality "resource" is a generic concept in k8s. K8s is a management/collaboration platform for "resources" and everything is a resource. You can define your own resource types too. And who knows, maybe in the future these won't be containers or even linux processes? Well it would still work given this model.
But now, what if you really just want to run a bunch of containers across a few machines?
My point is, it's overcomplicated and abstracts too heavily. Too smart even... I don't want my co workers to define our own resource types, we're not at a google scale company.
While I would love to test this tool, this is not something I would run on any machine :/
I wanted to try it out but was put off by this[0]. It’s just straight up curl | bash as root from raw.githubusercontent.com.
If this is the install process for a server (and not just for the CLI) I don’t want to think about security in general for the product.
Sorry, I really wanted to like this, but pass.
[0] https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud/blob/ebd4622592bcecedb...
You need to prepare the machine some other way first then, but it's just installing docker and the uncloud service.
I use the `--no-install` option with my own cluster, as I have my own pre-provisioning process that includes some additional setup beyond the docker/uncloud elements.
I'm not arguing that a repository is nice because versioning, signing, version yanking, etc, and I do agree that the process should be more transparent and verifiable for people who care about it.
The alternative is, deploying the script and with it have the uncloud files it needs.
current_context: default
contexts:
default:
connections:
- ssh: admin@192.168.0.10
ssh_key_file: ~/.ssh/uncloud
- ssh: admin@192.168.0.11
ssh_key_file: ~/.ssh/uncloud
- ssh: administrator@93.x.x.x
ssh_key_file: ~/.ssh/uncloud
- ssh: sysadmin@65.x.x.x
ssh_key_file: ~/.ssh/uncloud
You can either specify one of the machine SSH target in the config.yaml or pass it directly to the 'uc' CLI command, e.g.
uc --connect user@host deploy
In addition to deployments, uncloud handles clustering - connects machines and containers together. Service containers can discover other services via internal DNS and communicate directly over the secure overlay network without opening any ports on the hosts.
As far as I know kamal doesn’t provide an easy way for services to communicate across machines.
Services can also be scaled to multiple replicas across machines.
Are you working on this full time and if so, how are you funding it? Are you looking to monetize this somehow?
I’m working full time on this, yes. Funding from my savings at the moment and don’t have plans for any external funding or VC.
For monetisation, considering building a self-hosted and managed (SaaS) webUI for managing remote clusters and apps on them with value-added PaaS-like features.
Basically just configure it with `{service-name}.internal` to find other instances of the service.
The private container IPs will get NATed to the underlying EC2 IPs so requests to RDS will appear as coming from those instances. The appropriate Security Group(s) need to be configured as well. The limitation is that you can't segregate access at the service level, only at the EC2 instance level.
But I wonder what this solves?
Because I stopped abusing k8s and started using more container hosts with quadlets instead, using Ansible or Terraform depending on what the situation calls for.
It works just fine imho. The CI/CD pipeline triggers a podman auto-update command, and just like that all containers are running the latest version.
So what does uncloud add to this setup?
Your setup sounds like single-node or nodes that don't need to discover each other. If you ever need multi-node with service-to-service communication, that's where stitching together Ansible + Terraform + quadlets + some networking layer starts to get tedious. Uncloud tries to make that part simple out of the box.
You also get the reverse proxy (Caddy) that automatically reconfigures depending on what containers are running on machines. You just deploy containers and it auto-discovers them. If a container crashes, the configuration is auto-updated to remove the faulty container from the list of upstreams.
Plus a single CLI you run locally or on CI to manage everything, distribute images, stream logs. A lot of convenience that I'm putting together to make the user experience more enjoyable.
But if you don't need that, keep doing what works.
Technically I could allow my web proxy to discover my services today already, but I refuse to have Traefik (in my case) running as the same user as my services. I prefer to only let them talk over TCP/IP and configure them dynamically with Ansible instead.
It always amazed me that people used that feature in Traefik or Caddy, because it essentially requires your web proxy to have container access to all your other services. It seems a bit intimate to me, but maybe I'm old school.
Note that a DNS A record with multiple IPs doesn't provide failover, only round robin. But you can use the Cloudflare DNS proxy feature as a poor man's LB. Just add 2+ proxied A records (orange cloud) pointing to different machines. If one goes down with a 52x error, Cloudflare automatically fails over to the healthy one.
Could be something interesting to integrate though.
A proper load balancer or Cloudflare DNS proxy would handle this.
1. External requests, e.g. from the internet via the reverse proxy (Caddy) running in the cluster.
The rollout works on the container, not the server level. Each container registers itself in Caddy so it knows which containers to forward and distribute requests to.
When doing a rollout, a new version of container is started first, registers in caddy, then the old one is removed. This is repeated for each service container. This way, at any time there are running containers that serve requests.
It doesn’t say any server that requests shouldn’t go there. It just updates upstreams in the caddy config to send requests to the containers that are up and healthy.
2. Service to service requests within the cluster. In this case, a service DNS name is resolved to a list of IP addresses (running containers). And the client decides which one to send a request to or whether to distribute requests among them.
When the service is updated, the client needs to resolve the name again to get the up-to-date list of IPs. Many http clients handle this automatically so using http://service-name as an endpoint typically just works. But zero downtime should still be handled by the client in this case.
Like rescheduling automatically a container on another server if a server is down? Deploying on the less filled server first if you have set limits in your containers?
There is no automatic rescheduling in uncloud by design. At least for now. We will see how far we can get without it.
If you want your service to tolerate a host going down, you should deploy multiple replicas for that service on multiple machines in advance. 'uc scale' command can be used to run more replicas for an already deployed service.
Longer term, I'm thinking we can have a concept of primary/standby replicas for services that can only have one running replica, e.g. databases. Something similar to how Fly.io does this: https://fly.io/docs/apps/app-availability/#standby-machines-...
Regarding deploying on the less filled machine first is doable but not supported right now. By default, it picks the first machine randomly and tries to distributes replicas evenly among all available machines. You can also manually specify what target machine(s) each service should run on in your Compose file.
I want to avoid recreating the complexity with placement constraints, (anti-)affinity, etc. that makes K8s hard to reason about. There is a huge class of apps that need more or less static infra, manual placement, and a certain level of redundancy. That's what I'm targeting with Uncloud.
I share the same concern as top comments on security but going to check out out in more detail.
I wonder if you integrated some decentralized identity layer with DIDs, if this could be turned into some distributed compute platform?
Also, what is your thinking on high availability and fail failovers?
But this goes with assumption that one already know docker compose spec. For exact same reason I'm in love for `podman kube play` to just use k8s manifests to quickly test run on local machine - and not bother with some "legacy" compose.
(I never liked Docker Inc. so I never learned THEIR tooling, it's not needed to build/run containers)
When you run 'uc deploy' command:
- it reads the spec from your compose.yaml
- inspects the current state of the services in the cluster
- computes the diff and deployment plan to reconcile it
- executes the plan after the confirmation
Please see the docs and demo: https://uncloud.run/docs/guides/deployments/deploy-app
The main difference with Docker Swarm is that the reconciliation process is run on your local/CI machine as part of the 'uc deploy' CLI command execution, not on the control plane nodes in the cluster.
And it's not running in the loop automatically. If the command fails, you get an instant feedback with the errors you can address or rerun the command again.
It should be pretty straightforward to wrap the CLI logic in a Terraform or Pulumi provider. The design principals are very similar and it's written in Go.
I get that putting the declarative spec in the control plane and having the service autoreconcile continuously is another layer but this is great as a start.
In fact could you not just cron the cli deployment command on the nodes and get an effective poor man's declarative layer to guard against node failures if your ok with a 1 min or 1 sec recovery objective?
In the project discord, a user recently experimented with a custom setup that sounds very similar to what you describe.
In fact, a big part of uncloud’s appeal to me is that it also provides powerful building blocks for more complex, custom systems like this, not just the streamlined workflow for simpler, standard cases.
What specifically do you mean by ipv6 support?
This question does not make sense. This is equivalent to asking "What specifically do you mean by ipv4 support"
These days both protocols must be supported, and if there is a blocker it should be clearly mentioned.
What do you think about the general approach in Uncloud? It almost feels like a cousin of Swarm. Would love to get your take on it.
> I’m building Uncloud after years of managing Kubernetes
did you manage Kubernetes, or did you make the fateful mistake of managing microk8s?
If you do anything professional, you better choose proven software like kubernetes or managed kubernetes or whatever else all the hyperscalers provide.
And the complexity you are solving now or have to solve, k8s solved. IaC for example, Cloud Provider Support for provisioning a LB out of the box, cert-manager, all the helm charts for observability, logging, a ecosystem to fall back to (operators), ArgoCD <3, storage provisioning, proper high availability, kind for e2e testing on cicd, etc.
I'm also aways lost why people think k8s is so hard to operate. Just take a managed k8s. There are so many options out there and they are all compatible with the whole k8s ecosystem.
Look if you don't get kubernetes, its use casees, advantages etc. fine absolutly fine but your solution is not an alternative to k8s. Its another container orchestrator like nomad and k8s and co. with it own advantages and disadvantages.
I need to run on-prem, so managed k8s is not an option. Experts tells me I should have 2 FTE to run k8s, which I don't have. k8s has so many components, how should I debug that in case of issues without k8s experience? k8s APIs change continuously, how should I manage that without k8s experience?
It's not a k8s replacement. But I do see a sweet spot for such a solution. We still run Docker Swarm on 5 servers, no hyperscalers, no API changes expected ;-)
Some people would rather build their own solutions to do these things with fine-grain control and the ability to handle workloads more complex that a shopping cart website.
The protocols are bad, as is the tech supporting them.
To me, the control plane is the primary feature of kubernetes and one I would not want to go without.
I know this describes operational overhead as a reason, but how it relates to the control plane is not clear to me. even managing a few hundred nodes and maybe 10,000 containers, relatively small - I update once a year and the managed cluster updates machine images and versions automatically. Are people trying to self host kubernetes for production cases, and that’s where this pain comes from?
Sorry if it is a rude question.
That feels not small to me. For something I'm working on I'll probably have two nodes and around 10 containers. If it works out and I get some growth, maybe that will go up to, say, 5-7 nodes and 30 or so containers? I dunno. I'd like some orchestration there, but k8s feels way too heavy even for my "grown" case.
I feel like there are potentially a lot of small businesses at this sort of scale?
It’s a similar experience when a cloud provider manages the control plane for you. But you have to worry about the availability when you host everything yourself. Losing etcd quorum results in an unusable cluster.
Many people want to avoid this, especially when running at a smaller scale like a handful of machines.
The cluster network can even partition and each partition continues to operate allowing to deploy/update apps individually.
That’s essentially what we all did in a pre-k8s era with chef and ansible but without the boilerplate and reinventing the wheel, and using the learnings from k8s and friends.
I have managed custom server clusters in a self hosted situation. the problems are hard, but if you’re small, why would you reach for such a solution in the first place? you’d be better off paying for a managed service. What situation forces so many people to reach to self hosted kubernetes?
"Lightweight datastore based on sqlite3 as the default storage backend. etcd3, MySQL, and Postgres are also available."
Of course they are…? That’s half the point of k8s - if you want to self host, you can, but it’s just like backups: if you never try it, you should assume you can’t do it when you need to
And that's just your CI jobs, right? ;)
Is a way to run arbitrary processes on a bunch of servers.
But what if your processes are known beforehand? Than you don't need a scheduler, nor an orchestrator.
If it's just your web app with two containers and nothing more?
On cloud, in my experience, you are mostly paying for compute with managed kubernetes instances. The overhead and price is almost never kubernetes itself, but the compute and storage you are provisioning, which, thanks to the control plane, you have complete control over. what am i missing?
I wouldn’t dare try to with a small shop try to self host a production kubernetes solution unless i was under duress. But I just dont see what the control plane has to do with it. It’s the feature that makes kubernetes worth it.
Now I almost finished the setting up part using a single-node (for now) Kubernetes cluster running with Talos Linux, and all of the manifest files managed with Cue lang (seriously, I would have abandoned it if I had not discovered Cue to generate and type check all of the yaml).
I think Kubernetes is the right solution for the complexity of what I'm running, but even though it was a hassle to manage the storage, the backups, the auth, the networking and so on, I much prefer having all of this hosted at my house.
But I agree with the control plane part, just pointing out my use case for self-hosting k8s
Regulated industries, transportation and logistics companies, critical industries, etc.
> even managing a few hundred nodes and maybe 10,000 containers, relatively small - I update once a year and the managed cluster updates machine images and versions automatically. Are people trying to self host kubernetes for production cases, and that’s where this pain comes from?
Much of the pain of kubernetes is not the day to day care and feeding of the applications most of the time, it's managing the cluster itself, upgrades, hardware, etc.
Many regulated industries can not run certain workloads in "the cloud", hence where the pain of running kubernetes (at least at first) comes from.
A control plane makes controlling machines easier, that's the point of a control plane.
It can be challenging. Lots and lots of knobs.
IMO kubernetes is great if your job is to fiddle with Kubernetes. But damn, the overhead is insane. There is this broad swathe of middle-sized tech companies and non-tech Internet application providers (eg ecommerce, governments, logistics, etc.) that spend a lot of their employees' time operating Kubernetes clusters, and a lot of money on the compute for those clusters, which they probably overprovision and also overpay for through some kind of managed Kubernetes/hyperscaler platform + a bunch of SaaS for things like metrics and logging, container security products, alerting. A lot of these guys are spending 10-40% of their budget on compute, payroll, and SaaS to host CRUD applications that could probably run on a small number of servers without a "platform" team behind it, just a couple of developers who know what they're doing.
Unless they're paying $$$ each of these deployments is running their own control plane and dealing with all the operational and cognitive overhead that entails. Most of those are running in a small number of datacenters alongside a bunch of other people running/managing/operating kubernetes clusters of their own. It's insanely wasteful because if there were a proper multitenant service mesh implementation (what I'm working on) that was easy to use, everybody could share the same control plane ~per datacenter and literally just consume the Kubernetes APIs they actually need, the ones that let them run and orchestrate/provision their application, and forget about all the fucking configuration of their cluster. BTW, that is how Borg works, which Kubernetes was hastily cobbled-together to mimic in order to capitalize on Containers Being So Hot Right Now.
The vast majority of these Kubernetes users just want to run their applications, their customers don't know or care that Kubernetes is in the picture at all, and the people writing the checks would LOVE to not be spending so much and money on the same platform engineering problems as every other midsize company on the Internet.
> what is the use case or benefit of not having a control plane?
All that is to say, it's not having to pay for a bunch of control plane nodes and SaaS and a Kubernetes guy/platform team. At small and medium scales, it's running a bunch of container instances as long as possible without embarking on a 6-24mo, $100k-$10m+ expedition to Do Kubernetes. It's not having to secure some fricking VPC with a million internal components and plugins/SaaS, it's not letting some cloud provider own your soul, and not locking you in to something so expensive you have to hire an entire internal team of Kubernetes-guys to set it up.
All the value in the software industry comes from the actual applications people are paying for. So the better you can let people do that without infrastructure getting in the way, the better. Making developers deal with this bullshit (or deciding to have 10-30% of your developers deal with it fulltime) is what gets in the way: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/components/
I can only speak most recently for EKS, but the cost is spent almost entirely on compute. I’m a one man shop managing 10,000 containers. I basically only spend on the compute itself, which is not all that much, and certainly far, far less than hiring a sys admin. Self hosted anything would be a huge PITA for me and likely end up costing more.
Yes, you can avoid kubernetes and being a “slave” to cloud providers, but I personally believe you’re making infrastructure tradeoffs in a bad way, and likely spending as much in the long run anyway.
maybe my disconnect here is that I mostly deal with full production scale applications, not hobby projects I am hosting on my own network (nothing wrong with that, and I would agree k8s is overkill for something like that).
Eventually though, at scale, I strongly believe you will need or want a control plane of some type for your container fleets, and that typically ends up looking or acting like k8s.
Some questions I have based on my swarm usage:
- do you plan to support secrets?
- with swarm and traefik, I can define url rewrite rules as container labels. Is something equivalent available?
- if I deploy 2 compose 'stacks', do all containers have access to all other containers, even in the other stack?
Yep, you define the mapping between the domain name and the internal container port as `x-ports: app.example.com:8000/https` in the compose file. Or you can specify a custom Caddy config for the service as `x-caddy: Caddyfile` which allows to customise it however you like. See https://uncloud.run/docs/concepts/ingress/publishing-service...
>if I deploy 2 compose 'stacks', do all containers have access to all other containers, even in the other stack?
Yes, there is no network isolation between containers from different services/stacks at the moment. Here is an open discussion on stack/namespace/environment/project concepts and isolation: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud/discussions/94.
What's your use case and how would you want this to behave?
I'm deploying Swarm and traefik as described here: https://dockerswarm.rocks/traefik/#create-the-docker-compose...
I like that I can put my containers to be exposed on the traefik-public network, and keep others like databases unreachable from traefik. This organisation of networks is very useful, allowing to make containers reachable across stacks, but also to keep some containers in a stack reachable only from other containers on the same network in that same stack.
Regarding questions 2 and 3, the short answers are "not at the moment" and "yes, for now", here's a relevant discussion that touches on both points: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud/discussions/94
Speaking of Swarm and your experience with it: in your opinion, is there anything that Swarm lacks or makes difficult, that tools like Uncloud could conceptually "fix"?
- energy in the community is low, it's hard to find an active discussion channel of swarm users
- swarm does not support the complete compose file format. This is really annoying
- sometimes, deploys fail for unclear reasons (eg a network was not found, but why as it's defined in the compose file?) and work the next try. This is never lead to problems, but doesn't feel right
- working with authenticate/custom registries is somewhat cumbersome
- having to work with registries to have the same image deployed on all nodes is sometimes annoying. It could be cool to have images spreading across nodes.
- there's no contact between devs and users. I've just discovered uncloud and I've had more contact with its devs here than in years of using swarm!
- the firewalling is not always clear/clean
- logs accessibility (service vs container) and containers identification: when a container fails to start, it's sometimes harder than needed to debug (esp when it is because the image is not available)
If you want something even simpler, something that doesn't run on your servers at all, you can look at Kamal: https://kamal-deploy.org
What I like about Kamal is that it's backed by a company that actually fully moved out of K8s and cloud, so every release is battle-tested first.
BTW just looking at other variations on the theme:
Feel free to add more.
I'm always looking for new alternatives there, I've recently tried Coolify but it didn't feel very polished and mostly clunky. I'm still happy with Dokku at this point but would love to have a better UI for managing databases etc.
- What databases you want to work with?
- What functionality you want from such a UI?
- What database size we are talking here?
Asking because I am tinkering with a similar idea.
You can't really do anything with it except work for Hashicorp for free, or create a fork that nobody is allowed to use unless they self-host it.
I am wondering how state replication works on the backend. The design mentions using crdt and a gossip proto, but I'm not sure what is actually implemented as it is a tad vague. I haven't dug into the code so forgive me if it is obvious or explained elsewhere.
https://github.com/mudler/edgevpn https://www.iroh.computer/
Looks like the docs assume the management of a single cluster. What if you want to manage multiple/distinct clusters from the same uc client/management env?
Uncloud supports having multiple contexts (think - clusters) in the same configuration file, or you can also use separate config files (via --uncloud-config attribute).
There is also an internal DNS for service discovery and it supports a `nearest.` prefix, which will preferentially use instances of a service running on the same machine. For example, I run a globally replicated NATS service and then connect to it from other services using the `nearest.nats.internal` address to connect to the machine-local NATS node.
This would have been my choice had it existed three months ago. Now it feels like I learned kubernetes in vain xD
On the bright side, you can always use both
Would love to hear about what you think is "light" about Dokku if you have some time for feedback.
Regardless, hope you find a tool you're happy with :)
Also another community member shared his homelab with a couple dozen services migrated from Docker Compose to Uncloud: https://github.com/dasunsrule32/docker-compose-configs/tree/...
Even coolify lets you add as many machines as you want and then manage docker containers in all machines from one coolify installation.
It also has the WireGuard overlay networking built in so containers across machines get direct connectivity without having to map ports to the host. For example, securely access a database running on another machine. This also allows you to horizontally scale your services to multiple replicas on different machines and distribute traffic between them with minimal configuration.
The current state of Uncloud is the primitives and foundation that could be used to build a more higher-level PaaS-like solution such as Coolify.
edit: Well, it would appear that the very maintainer of Dokku himself replied to the parent comment. My information is clearly outdated and I'd only look at this comment[0] to get the proper info.
Gonna burn bridges with this lack of transparency. I love the intent but the implementation is so bad that I probably wont look back.
No UI yet (planned) so if that's critical, Dokploy is likely a better choice for now.
However, some unique features like building and pushing images directly to your nodes without an external registry give Uncloud a PaaS-like feel, just CLI-first. Really depends on what you're hosting and what you're optimising for.
See short deploy demo: https://uncloud.run/docs/guides/deployments/deploy-app
But, as a lead for implementations, I just couldn’t in good conscience permit something that is not an industry standard and not supported by my cloud provider. First from a self interested standpoint, it looks a lot better on their resume to say “I did $x using K8s”.
From an onboarding standpoint, just telling a new employee “we use K8s -here you go” means nothing new to learn.
If you are part of the industry, just suck it up and learn Kubernetes. Your future self won’t regret it - coming from someone who in fact has not learn K8s.
This is a challenge any new framework is going to have.
I can’t find it now, but I could swear I saw somewhere he said he’s working on this full time and living off of savings. If I’m wrong he will correct me I am sure. If that’s the case, I assume he wants to make this a business.
He has to think about those objection. Would he better off by first creating a known Kubernetes environment and then building an easier wrapper around that so someone could manage the K8s cluster in case they don’t want a dependency only on his product? I don’t have those answers
I know how to use k8s but I really don't enjoy it. It feels so distasteful to me that it triggered me to make an attempt at designing a nicer experience, because why not. I remember how much fun I had trying Docker when it first came out. That inspires me to at least try. It doesn't seem like the k8s community is even trying unfortunately.
The move to VMs at first and then to the cloud were also marketed by existing companies with huge budgets where people who made decisions had the “No one ever got fired for choosing $LargeWellknownCompany that is in the upper right corner of Gartner’s Magic Square”.
I love Docker. I think everyone going to EKS before they need to is dumb. There are dozens of services out there that let you give it a Docker container and just run it.
And I think that spending energy avoiding “cloud lock-in” is dumb. Choose your infrastructure and build. Migrations are going to be a pain at any decent scale anyway and you are optimizing for the wrong thing if you are worried about lock in.
As an individual especially in today’s market, it’s foolish (not referring to you - any developer or adjacent) not to always be thinking of what keeps you the most employable if the rug gets pulled from under you.
As a decision maker who is held accountable for architecture and when things go wrong they look at or when the next person has to come along to maintain it, they are going to look at me like I am crazy if I choose a non industry standard solution just because I was too lazy to choose the industry standard.
Again I don’t mean that you are being “lazy”. That’s how people think.
But if I were hiring someone - and I’m often interviewing people for cloudy/devOps type roles. Why would I hire someone with experience with a Docker orchestration framework I never heard of over someone who knew K8s?
And the final question you should ask yourself is why are you really doing this?
Is it to scratch an itch out of passion and it’s something that you feel the world should have? If so in all sincerity, I wish you luck on your endeavor. You might get lucky like Bun just did. I had effusive praise for them doing something out of passion instead of as VC bait.
Are you doing it for financial gain? If so, you have to come up with a strategy to overcome resistance from people like Ive outlined.
Uncloud[0] is a container orchestrator without a control plane. Think multi-machine Docker Compose with automatic WireGuard mesh, service discovery, and HTTPS via Caddy. Each machine just keeps a p2p-synced copy of cluster state (using Fly.io's Corrosion), so there's no quorum to maintain.
I’m building Uncloud after years of managing Kubernetes in small envs and at a unicorn. I keep seeing teams reach for K8s when they really just need to run a bunch of containers across a few machines with decent networking, rollouts, and HTTPS. The operational overhead of k8s is brutal for what they actually need.
A few things that make it unique:
- uses the familiar Docker Compose spec, no new DSL to learn
- builds and pushes your Docker images directly to your machines without an external registry (via my other project unregistry [1])
- imperative CLI (like Docker) rather than declarative reconciliation. Easier mental model and debugging
- works across cloud VMs, bare metal, even a Raspberry Pi at home behind NAT (all connected together)
- minimal resource footprint (<150MB ram)
[0]: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud
[1]: https://github.com/psviderski/unregistry