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Uncloud - Tool for deploying containerised apps across servers without k8s

uncloud.run

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Re: Uncloud - Tool for deploying containerised apps across servers without k8s

#151

Post by psviderski »

Glemkloksdjf wrote: post #86
morcus wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the point? You can say that about anything, and that's the whole reason why it's good that alternatives exist. 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.

Uncloud is so far away from k8s, its not k8s like. A normal person wouldn't think 'hey lets use k8s for the low stakes deployment over here'.

>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

Re: Uncloud - Tool for deploying containerised apps across servers without k8s

#152

Post by psviderski »

INTPenis wrote: post #130
psviderski wrote: post #2

Hey, creator here. Thanks for sharing this! 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 unicor…

We have similar backgrounds, and I totally agree with your k8s sentiment. 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 w…

Great setup! Where Uncloud helps is when you need containers across multiple machines to talk to each other.

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.

Re: Uncloud - Tool for deploying containerised apps across servers without k8s

#153

Post by psviderski »

sam-cop-vimes wrote: post #99
psviderski wrote: post #2

Hey, creator here. Thanks for sharing this! 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 unicor…

I really like what is on offer here - thank you for building it. Re the private network it builds with Wireguard, how are services running within this private network supposed to access AWS services such as RDS securely? Tailscale has this: https://tailscale.com/kb/1141/aws-rds

Thanks! If you're running the ucloud cluster in AWS, service containers should be able to access RDS the same way the underlying EC2 instances can (assuming RDS is in the same VPC or reachable via VPC peering).

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.

Re: Uncloud - Tool for deploying containerised apps across servers without k8s

#154

Post by psviderski »

calgoo wrote: post #22
mosselman wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a graph that shows a multi provider setup for a domain. Where would routing to either machine happen? As in which ip would you use on the dns side?

Not OP, but you could do "simple" dns load balancing between both endpoints.

As I mentioned in the sibling comment, please note that in this case you only get round-robin, not failover. If one of the addresses is down, the DNS record will continue returning it and users will hit a dead end.

A proper load balancer or Cloudflare DNS proxy would handle this.

Re: Uncloud - Tool for deploying containerised apps across servers without k8s

#155

Post by psviderski »

bluepuma77 wrote: post #111
Glemkloksdjf wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you build an insecure version of nomad/kubernetes and co? 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…

It's not a k8s replacement. It's for the small dev team with no k8s experience. For people that might not use Docker Swarm because they see it's a pretty dead project. For people who think "everyone uses k8s", so we should, too. 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 iss…

How was your Swarm experience so far? It's so disappointing that Docker seems to slowly but steadily abandoning it. There is only a couple dozen mainly maintenance commits in the swarmkit repo for the entire 2025 year :sigh:

Re: Uncloud - Tool for deploying containerised apps across servers without k8s

#156

Post by stevefan1999 »

weitendorf wrote: post #122
stevefan1999 wrote: post #28

If not K8S, why not Nomad ( https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad )?

Their license does not allow you to modify it and then offer it as a service to others: https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/blob/main/LICENSE 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.

well you can always fork the version before the license change

Re: Uncloud - Tool for deploying containerised apps across servers without k8s

#157

Post by psviderski »

raphinou wrote: post #118

I'm a docker swarm user, and this is the first alternative that looks interesting to me! 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?

>with swarm and traefik, I can define url rewrite rules as container labels. Is something equivalent available?

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?

Re: Uncloud - Tool for deploying containerised apps across servers without k8s

#158

Post by psviderski »

scottydelta wrote: post #41

As a happy user of coolify, what’s the difference between these two? Even coolify lets you add as many machines as you want and then manage docker containers in all machines from one coolify installation.

Uncloud is a bit lower-level, CLI-only (for now), with no central server. If some nodes go offline, the rest keep working and stay manageable.

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.

Re: Uncloud - Tool for deploying containerised apps across servers without k8s

#159

Post by psviderski »

HisNameIsTor wrote: post #94

Very nice! This would have been my choice had it existed three months ago. Now it feels like I learned kubernetes in vain xD

Haha the K8s knowledge will definitely pay off. But Uncloud did exist three months ago. Clearly my marketing needs work :D

On the bright side, you can always use both

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