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Canonical Launches MicroCloud to Deploy Your Own "Fully Functional Cloud"

129 points| laktak | 2 years ago |phoronix.com

89 comments

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[+] lproven|2 years ago|reply
[+] cloudbonsai|2 years ago|reply
Mmm. So is MicroCloud essentially a glue between LXD + Ceph?

It's not really clear what the problem MicroCloud is trying to solve, though. Considering that LXD already supports multi-node clustering, why does anyone want another cluster manager on top of LXD?

[+] linuxftw|2 years ago|reply
This demo is very hard to follow indeed. They are just jumping around, demoing features, but not talking about how it all fits together.
[+] 0xbadcafebee|2 years ago|reply
So basically it's VMware but with more nodes required
[+] kunwon1|2 years ago|reply
I tried very hard to get onboard with Ubuntu's new server paradigm, I've been using Ubuntu on and off since 2005. Snap is what turned me away. My research (admittedly several years out of date) told me that it was impossible to disable 'auto-updating' of Snaps. Now I see that they're rolling out what is apparently a high availability service built on services deployed through Snap. I don't see how this is viable, if Snap is still dead set on updating things on their own schedule. I certainly wouldn't trust it without some in-depth testing and validation to ensure that Canonical can't remotely DoS me by pushing some new update that I can't opt out of.
[+] _zoltan_|2 years ago|reply
snaps are horrible and a big deterrent. I stopped recommending ubuntu because of them. Total dead end.
[+] sen|2 years ago|reply
So.. we’re back to self-hosting your own services?

And IT does another cycle.

[+] soneil|2 years ago|reply
We never really left.

I work with an enterprisey on-prem product, which we of-course tried to replace with a cloud offer. And in all fairness, it's generally gone well - but because we manage the platform, it sits in the cloud we chose. And that's never going to be the right choice for everyone.

So we have some customers who are concerned about national boundaries. We have some customers who offer their own clouds, and aren't hugely enthusiastic about using the competition's. And then the whole mess with the govt having isolated regions within otherwise-public cloud offers.

Between these, it quickly became apparent that replacing our traditional offer with *aaS would leave a lot of money on the table. It's a minority of customers, but it turns out to be a very valuable minority.

Within that context at least, "private clouds" start to feel like they have legs - bringing most of the benefits of the cloud, to places that 'public' can't reach.

[+] AugustoCAS|2 years ago|reply
I have the strong impression that most people confound cloud to be public only. Private clouds are fine and deliver a lot of the flexibility at a big % discount of a public cloud.

The big gain from clouds is the flexible infrastructure, especially in the microservices world we are now. In the past, one needed to procure, provision, etc a new server to run a service (times X per environment). With a cloud, regardless if it's public or private, provisioning a VM (or container) to run a new service is a few clicks away.

[+] baz00|2 years ago|reply
Yep. My future is cloud offboarding and cost mitigation consultancy.

Been through the fad cycle three times now and worked out where to make money :)

[+] withinboredom|2 years ago|reply
Some of us never left... I can't justify paying that much money just to execute some code on another person's server.
[+] dividedbyzero|2 years ago|reply
> And IT does another cycle.

People keep saying that as if it was a bad thing

[+] throw0101a|2 years ago|reply
> So.. we’re back to self-hosting your own services?

It never stopped: plenty of places have on-site VMware and Hyper-V, both of which provide (IIRC) APIs to automated VM creation. If you're more open source, there's OpenStack (which VMware has a API-compat layer for).

[+] hospitalJail|2 years ago|reply
Always depends on the usecase.

Medical, we do everything in-house to make life easier.

Low value servers, in-house.

High uptime + scalable? You are not doing that in-house.

[+] 0xbadcafebee|2 years ago|reply
Yes, but spending money on garbage tech products fuels the economy now. It's not like we make anything else.
[+] rozenmd|2 years ago|reply
It's not so much a cycle as a helix IMO, things are better now.
[+] Havoc|2 years ago|reply
> snap

> Ubuntu Pro

> driving […] subscription

Think I’ll stick LXC on proxmox

[+] doublerabbit|2 years ago|reply
Good choice.

FreeBSD and jailed bHyve cells for me.

[+] NorwegianDude|2 years ago|reply
LXD is better than Proxmox in my opinion, and it's free for a stable version.
[+] tmikaeld|2 years ago|reply
Ditto, been running Proxmox 15+ years and it's been rock solid.

The only thing I miss is the kind of automatic deployment and network layers that Kubernetes has.

[+] sl-1|2 years ago|reply
Yep, Proxmox seems a lot more stable
[+] Throwfi44|2 years ago|reply
At home I have a small server farm of cheap Ryzen PCs. Mostly continuous integration and testing for open source projects, but also some LLM.

If I have some idea, I just throw it into farm and see results a few days later. It is slower than renting in cloud, bit about 4x cheaper.

It also heats my house a bit in winter...

[+] Roark66|2 years ago|reply
You must have cheap electricity where you live...
[+] sunshine-o|2 years ago|reply
Potentially great move for Ubuntu if the economic conditions push companies to invest to reduce their IT opex & get off the public clouds (and also if Gartner tell them to do so...).

Now I know Ubuntu just launched the product but damn they suck at selling it. The landing page doesn't even give you examples of applications you can run on it.

Also I'm sorry but you need to have the word "docker" a few times on that page if you want to catch any flies. Your CTO/CIO will also want to see some kind of fake enterprise app store to consider it.

[+] grumpyprole|2 years ago|reply
It's only "fully functional" if it's running Haskell or OCaml. ducks
[+] lloydatkinson|2 years ago|reply
I recently tried Mikrok8s from Canonical and at idle (as in not running any of my containers) it ranges from 5% to 15%. I hope this product doesn't suffer the same wastage.
[+] millerhooks|2 years ago|reply
There are issues with the grvfs client that gets into a race condition with the disc volumes. It will saturate the max_connections and eat resources at idle. Not sure if this is your issue, I have yet to find a real solution other than uninstalling grvfs-backends and bumping the max user and connections. I got this workaround added to the charmed kubeflow QuickStart. It’s not the correct solution though and I’m pretty spent on the issue.
[+] DiabloD3|2 years ago|reply
This is going to be very uncomfortable when Supermicro sues Canonical over a trademarked term.

Supermicro has been selling Microclouds for years, and is a well known product line in the industry.

[+] tw04|2 years ago|reply
Just like it was a very uncomfortable situation when Anderson sued Microsoft over the term windows?

Canonical is selling a piece of software, supermicro a line of servers.

And based on their own site it isn’t trademarked. Notice there’s no r next to the microcloud server but there is next to microblade.

https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/blade

[+] Eumenes|2 years ago|reply
So OpenStack?
[+] 0xbadcafebee|2 years ago|reply
But actually less features than OpenStack. Kind of weird that they didn't just package OpenStack. A vendor to manage it for you would actually provide business value
[+] Scubabear68|2 years ago|reply
What are the implications of the AGPL license for this (if any)?
[+] oopsthrowpass|2 years ago|reply
my understanding is that you can't sell this cloud as a service (AWS would not be able to use it)
[+] meonkeys|2 years ago|reply
It means all derivative works of microcloud must also be licensed AGPL (if someone else "links" other software into it, makes modifications and re-distributes, they must provide those modifications, etc).

Any company can sell microcloud, but it must remain AGPL.

This license choice is a defense against microcloud being assimilated into proprietary products.

(Now I'll guess at the motivation of your original question. Lemme know if I missed your point...) The AGPL doesn't apply to any containers or VMs running in a microcloud any more than Ubuntu's licensing applies to programs you run on Ubuntu.