Uncloud - Tool for deploying containerised apps across servers without k8s

Post by _joel » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 9:05 AM UTC

psviderski wrote: post #26

JohnMakin wrote: post #17

Having spent most of my career in kubernetes (usually managed by cloud), I always wonder when I see things like this, what is the use case or benefit of not having a control plane? 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 h…

Not rude at all. The benefit is a much simpler model where you simply connect machines in a network where every machine is equal. You can add more, remove some. No need to worry about an HA 3-node centralised “cluster brain”. There isn’t one. 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 qu…

Post by m1keil » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 9:10 AM UTC

Post by jabr » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 9:19 AM UTC

utopiah wrote: post #16

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…

Neat, as you include quite a few tool for services to be reachable together (not necessarily to the outside), do you also have tooling to make those services more interoperable?

Post by esseph » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 9:39 AM UTC

nullpoint420 wrote: post #6

topspin wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I keep seeing teams reach for K8s when they really just need to run a bunch of containers across a few machines" 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 "orche…

100%. I’m really not sure why K8S has become the complexity boogeyman. I’ve seen CDK apps or docker compose files that are way more difficult to understand than the equivalent K8S manifests.

Post by sgt » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 9:42 AM UTC

m1keil wrote: post #32

stevefan1999 wrote: post #28

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

Nomad is great, but you will still end up with a control plane.