About Ubicloud
Ubicloud is an open-source cloud platform designed to run on any infrastructure, described by its authors as an open alternative to cloud providers in the way Linux is to proprietary operating systems. It delivers infrastructure-as-a-service capabilities on top of bare-metal hosts, for example Hetzner, Leaseweb and AWS Bare Metal.
Its services include elastic compute, non-replicated block storage, firewalls and load balancers, managed Postgres, Kubernetes, AI inference and IAM. A control plane takes leased bare-metal Linux machines, prepares them for cloud use, and then lets you provision and manage resources through a cloud console. The project is written in Ruby and topics also mention GitHub Actions runners.
You can use the managed platform at console.ubicloud.com without installing anything, where the underlying provider's price and location benefits are passed on to you, or build your own cloud by leasing servers and running the control plane yourself. Ubicloud is licensed under AGPL-3.0. The quick-start flow is currently described for Hetzner machines running Ubuntu 24.04.
Key features
- Elastic compute on bare-metal servers
- Block storage, firewalls and load balancers
- Managed PostgreSQL databases
- Managed Kubernetes clusters
- AI inference services
- IAM and cloud console
Good fit for
- →Building a private cloud on leased bare metal
- →Running managed Postgres outside the big clouds
- →Moving cloud workloads away from AWS
- Tags
- cloud
- iaas
- bare-metal
- postgresql
- kubernetes
- self-hosted
- aws-alternative
- ruby
Ubicloud: questions and answers
- What is Ubicloud used for?
- Ubicloud is an open-source cloud platform that turns bare-metal Linux servers into an AWS-style cloud with compute, storage, networking, managed Postgres, Kubernetes and AI inference. It is a good fit for building a private cloud on leased bare metal, running managed Postgres outside the big clouds and moving cloud workloads away from AWS.
- Is Ubicloud open source?
- Yes. Ubicloud is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at ubicloud/ubicloud and is written mainly in Ruby.
- Is Ubicloud free?
- Yes. Ubicloud is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available.
- Can I self-host Ubicloud?
- Yes. Ubicloud can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What is Ubicloud an alternative to?
- Ubicloud is an open-source alternative to Amazon Web Services, Hetzner Cloud, DigitalOcean and Elastic. Other open-source alternatives to Amazon Web Services include Sealos and Apache CloudStack.
- Is Ubicloud actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to Ubicloud was on 2 October 2026. The project has 12k stars on GitHub.
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