Uncloud

Docker simplicity. Multi-machine power.

Uncloud is a lightweight clustering and container orchestration tool that lets you deploy and manage web apps across cloud VMs and bare metal with minimised cluster management overhead. It creates a secure WireGuard mesh network between your Docker hosts and provides automatic service discovery, load balancing, ingress with HTTPS, and simple CLI commands to manage your apps.

Unlike traditional orchestrators, there's no central control plane and quorum to maintain. Each machine maintains a synchronised copy of the cluster state through peer-to-peer communication, keeping cluster operations functional even if some machines go offline.

Uncloud is the solution for developers who want the flexibility of self-hosted infrastructure without the operational complexity of Kubernetes.

✨ Features

• Deploy anywhere: Combine cloud VMs, dedicated servers, and bare metal into a unified computing environment — regardless of location or provider.
• Docker Compose: Familiar Docker Compose format for defining services and volumes. No need to learn a new bespoke DSL.
• Zero-downtime deployments: Rolling updates without service interruption. Automatic rollback on failure is coming soon.
• Service discovery: Built-in DNS server resolves service names to container IPs.
• Persistent storage: Run stateful services with Docker volumes managed across machines.
• Zero-config private network: Automatic WireGuard mesh with peer discovery and NAT traversal. Containers get unique IPs for direct cross-machine communication.
• No control plane: Fully decentralised design eliminates single points of failure and reduces operational overhead.
• Imperative over declarative: Favoring imperative operations over state reconciliation simplifies both the mental model and troubleshooting.
• Managed DNS: Automatic DNS records *.<id>.cluster.uncloud.run for services with public access via managed Uncloud DNS service.
• Automatic HTTPS: Built-in Caddy reverse proxy handles TLS certificate provisioning and renewal using Let's Encrypt.
• Docker-like CLI: Familiar commands for managing both infrastructure and applications.
• Remote management: Control your entire infrastructure through SSH access to any single machine in the cluster.

🚀 Coming soon

• Unregistry integration: Push your Docker images directly to your machines without an external registry. It will transfer only the missing layers, making it fast and efficient.

🎬 Quick demo

The screenshot below demonstrates how I use Uncloud to deploy the Uncloud Documentation website to 2 remote machines (why not?) from the compose.yaml file on my local machine.

It exposes the container port 8000/tcp as HTTPS on the domain docs.uncloud.run, served by the Caddy reverse proxy on the remote machines. All managed by Uncloud.

Here is a more advanced use case. Deploy a highly available web app with automatic HTTPS across multiple regions and on-premises in just a couple minutes.

💫 Why Uncloud?

Modern cloud platforms like Heroku and Render offer amazing developer experiences but at a premium price. Traditional container orchestrators like Kubernetes provide power and flexibility but require significant operational expertise. I believe there's a sweet spot in between — a pragmatic solution for the majority of us who aren't running at Google scale. You should be able to:

• Own your infrastructure and data: Whether driven by costs, compliance, or flexibility, run applications on any combination of cloud VMs and personal hardware while controlling your data and maintaining the cloud-like experience you love.
• Stay simple as you grow: Start with a single machine and add more whenever you need without changing your workflow. No worrying about highly-available control planes or complex YAML configurations.
• Build with proven primitives: Get production-grade networking, deployment primitives, service discovery, load balancing, and ingress with HTTPS out of the box without becoming a distributed systems expert.
• Support sustainable computing 🌿: Minimise system overhead to maximise resources available for your applications.

Uncloud's goal is to make deployment and management of containerised applications feel as seamless as using a cloud platform, whether you're running on a $5 VPS, a spare Mac mini, or a rack of bare metal servers.

🚀 Quick start

1. Install Uncloud CLI:

   brew install psviderski/tap/uncloud
   
   # or using curl (macOS/Linux)
   curl -fsS https://get.uncloud.run/install.sh | sh

   See Installation for more options.

2. Initialise your first machine:

   uc machine init root@your-server-ip

3. Deploy your app from a Docker image and publish its container port 8000 as HTTPS using app.example.com domain:

   uc run -p app.example.com:8000/https image/my-app

4. Create a DNS A record in your DNS provider (Cloudflare, Namecheap, etc.) that points app.example.com to your server's IP address. Allow a few minutes for DNS propagation.

   That's it! Your app is now running and accessible at https://app.example.com ✨

5. Clean up when you're done:

   uc ls
   # Copy the service name from the output and run the rm command:
   uc rm my-app-name

   If you want to fully uninstall Uncloud on a machine, run:

   uncloud-uninstall

View the Documentation for more information.

⚙️ How it works

Check out the design document to understand Uncloud's design philosophy and goals.

Here is a diagram of an Uncloud multi-provider cluster of 3 machines:

Peek under the hood to see what happens when you run certain commands.

When you initialise a new cluster on a machine:

$ uc machine init --name oracle-vm ubuntu@152.67.101.197

Downloading Uncloud install script: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/psviderski/uncloud/refs/heads/main/scripts/install.sh
⏳ Running Uncloud install script...
✓ Docker is already installed.
⏳ Installing Docker...
...
✓ Docker installed successfully.
✓ Linux user and group 'uncloud' created.
✓ Linux user 'ubuntu' added to group 'uncloud'.
⏳ Installing Uncloud binaries...
⏳ Downloading uncloudd binary: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud/releases/latest/download/uncloudd_linux_arm64.tar.gz
✓ uncloudd binary installed: /usr/local/bin/uncloudd
⏳ Downloading uninstall script: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/psviderski/uncloud/refs/heads/main/scripts/uninstall.sh
✓ uncloud-uninstall script installed: /usr/local/bin/uncloud-uninstall
✓ Systemd unit file created: /etc/systemd/system/uncloud.service
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/uncloud.service → /etc/systemd/system/uncloud.service.
⏳ Downloading uncloud-corrosion binary: https://github.com/psviderski/corrosion/releases/latest/download/corrosion-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
✓ uncloud-corrosion binary installed: /usr/local/bin/uncloud-corrosion
✓ Systemd unit file created: /etc/systemd/system/uncloud-corrosion.service
⏳ Starting Uncloud machine daemon (uncloud.service)...
✓ Uncloud machine daemon started.
✓ Uncloud installed on the machine successfully! 🎉
Cluster "default" initialised with machine "oracle-vm"
Waiting for the machine to be ready...

Reserved cluster domain: xuw3xd.cluster.uncloud.run
[+] Deploying service caddy 1/1
 ✔ Container caddy-c47x on oracle-vm  Started                                                                                                                                          0.9s

Updating cluster domain records in Uncloud DNS to point to machines running caddy service...
[+] Verifying internet access to caddy service 1/1
 ✔ Machine oracle-vm (152.67.101.197)  Reachable                                                                                                                                       0.1s

DNS records updated to use only the internet-reachable machines running caddy service:
  *.xuw3xd.cluster.uncloud.run  A → 152.67.101.197

1. The CLI SSHs into the machine and installs Docker, the uncloudd machine daemon and corrosion service, managed by systemd.
2. Generates a unique WireGuard key pair, allocates a dedicated subnet 10.210.0.0/24 for the machine and its containers, and configures uncloudd accordingly. All subsequent communication happens with uncloudd through its gRPC API over SSH.
3. Configures and starts corrosion, a CRDT-based distributed SQLite database to share cluster state between machines.
4. Creates a Docker bridge network connected to the WireGuard interface.
5. This machine becomes an entry point for the newly created cluster which is stored in the cluster config under ~/.config/uncloud on your local machine.

When you add another machine:

$ uc machine add --name hetzner-server root@5.223.45.199
Downloading Uncloud install script: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/psviderski/uncloud/refs/heads/main/scripts/install.sh
⏳ Running Uncloud install script...
✓ Docker is already installed.
✓ Linux user and group 'uncloud' created.
⏳ Installing Uncloud binaries...
⏳ Downloading uncloudd binary: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud/releases/latest/download/uncloudd_linux_amd64.tar.gz
✓ uncloudd binary installed: /usr/local/bin/uncloudd
⏳ Downloading uninstall script: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/psviderski/uncloud/refs/heads/main/scripts/uninstall.sh
✓ uncloud-uninstall script installed: /usr/local/bin/uncloud-uninstall
✓ Systemd unit file created: /etc/systemd/system/uncloud.service
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/uncloud.service → /etc/systemd/system/uncloud.service.
⏳ Downloading uncloud-corrosion binary: https://github.com/psviderski/corrosion/releases/latest/download/corrosion-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
✓ uncloud-corrosion binary installed: /usr/local/bin/uncloud-corrosion
✓ Systemd unit file created: /etc/systemd/system/uncloud-corrosion.service
⏳ Starting Uncloud machine daemon (uncloud.service)...
✓ Uncloud machine daemon started.
✓ Uncloud installed on the machine successfully! 🎉
Machine "hetzner-server" added to cluster
Waiting for the machine to be ready...

[+] Deploying service caddy 1/1
 ✔ Container caddy-d36c on hetzner-server  Started                                                                                                                                     1.0s

Updating cluster domain records in Uncloud DNS to point to machines running caddy service...
[+] Verifying internet access to caddy service 2/2
 ✔ Machine hetzner-server (5.223.45.199)  Reachable                                                                                                                                    0.2s
 ✔ Machine oracle-vm (152.67.101.197)     Reachable                                                                                                                                    0.1s

DNS records updated to use only the internet-reachable machines running caddy service:
  *.xuw3xd.cluster.uncloud.run  A → 152.67.101.197, 5.223.45.199

$ uc machine ls
NAME             STATE   ADDRESS         PUBLIC IP        WIREGUARD ENDPOINTS
oracle-vm        Up      10.210.0.1/24   152.67.101.197   10.0.0.95:51820, 152.67.101.197:51820
hetzner-server   Up      10.210.1.1/24   5.223.45.199     5.223.45.199:51820, [2a01:4ff:2f0:128b::1]:51820

1. The second machine gets provisioned just like the first. A non-root SSH user will need sudo access.
2. Allocates a new subnet 10.210.1.0/24 for the second machine and its containers.
3. Registers the second machine in the cluster state and exchanges WireGuard keys with the first machine.
4. Both machines establish a WireGuard tunnel between each other, allowing Docker containers connected to the bridge network to communicate directly across machines.
5. Configures and starts corrosion on the second machine to sync the cluster state.
6. The second machine is added as an alternative entry point in the cluster config.
7. If one of the machines goes offline, the other machine can still serve cluster operations.

If one more machine is added, the process repeats with a new subnet. The new machine needs to establish a WireGuard connection with only one of the existing machines. Other machines will learn about it through the shared cluster state and automatically establish a WireGuard tunnel with it.

When you run a service:

$ uc run -p app.example.com:8000/https image/my-app

[+] Running service my-app-1b3b (replicated mode) 1/1
 ✔ Container my-app-1b3b-tcex on oracle-vm  Started

my-app-1b3b endpoints:
 • https://app.example.com → :8000
 • https://my-app-1b3b.xuw3xd.cluster.uncloud.run → :8000

1. CLI picks a machine to run your container.
2. uncloudd that the CLI communicates with uses grpc-proxy to forward the request to the target machine to launch a container there.
3. uncloudd on the target machine starts the Docker container in the bridge network and stores its info in the cluster's distributed state.
4. The container gets a cluster-unique IP address from the bridge network (in the 10.210.X.2-254 range) and becomes accessible from other machines in the cluster.
5. Caddy reverse proxy which runs in global mode on each machine watches the cluster state for new services and updates its configuration to route traffic to the new container.

Look ma, no control plane or master nodes to maintain! Just a simple overlay network and eventually consistent state sync that lets machines work together. Want to check on things or make changes? Connect to any machine either implicitly using the CLI or directly over SSH. They all have the complete cluster state and can control everything. It's like each machine is a full backup of your control plane.

🏗 Project status

Uncloud is currently in active development and is not ready for production use. Features may change significantly and there may be breaking changes between releases.

We'd love your input! Here's how you can contribute:

• 🐛 Found a bug? Open an issue
• 💡 Have questions, ideas, or need help?
  • Start a discussion or join an existing one in the Discussions.
  • Join our Discord community where we discuss features, roadmap, implementation details, and help each other out.

🙏 Inspiration & Acknowledgements

I'm grateful to the following projects that inspired Uncloud's design and implementation:

• Kamal — for proving that even in the declarative era of Kubernetes there is a place for simple deployment tools that use imperative commands without complex orchestration. Kamal powers the multi-billion dollar company 37signals where it was created, and that's truly inspiring!
• Fly.io — for inspiring my vision for what self-hosted infrastructure should feel like, proving that developer experience and powerful infrastructure can coexist beautifully.
• Tailscale — for pioneering the vision of decentralised flat mesh networking with an amazing user experience that feels like magic.
• Talos Linux and KubeSpan — for the machine API design using grpc-proxy and for its elegant approach to secure WireGuard-based overlay networking with zero configuration.
• Docker Swarm Classic and Rancher 1.x — for showing the power of simplicity and pragmatism in container orchestration and that not every problem needs the complexity of Kubernetes.

Special thanks to the Corrosion project by Fly.io for providing the distributed SQLite database used to share Uncloud's cluster state.

📫 Stay updated

• Join our Discord server for real-time discussions, support, and updates.
• Follow @psviderski on X/Twitter.
• Subscribe to my newsletter to follow the progress, get early insights into new features, and be the first to know when it's ready for production use.
• Watch this repository for releases.

❤️ Contributors

Thank you @cedws for being the first contributor to Uncloud! 🎉