Build Your Own Cloud

In this guide, you’re going to build your own cloud on a bare metal provider. You’re going to set up Ubicloud’s control plane, lease bare metal instance(s) for the data plane, and cloudify those bare metal instances. Once cloudified, you can use elastic compute, virtual networking, and (local) block storage services.

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Create your control plane

Ubicloud follows an established architectural pattern in building public cloud services. A control plane manages a data plane, where the data plane leverages open-source software.

First, clone the Ubicloud project and initialize the control plane on your local environment. Then, connect to the cloud console.

git clone [email protected]:ubicloud/ubicloud.git

# Generate secrets for demo
./demo/generate_env

# Run containers: db-migrator, app (web & respirate), postgresql
docker-compose -f demo/docker-compose.yml up

# Visit localhost:3000

Once you’ve initialized the control plane, create a new user and sign into the cloud console.

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Lease bare metal instance(s) for data plane

You’ll now need to lease instance(s) for the data plane. The easiest way to do this is to lease an instance from a bare metal provider. Hetzner has server auctions available, where you pay monthly for bare metal: https://www.hetzner.com/sb

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Cloudify your instance(s)

Run the following script for each instance you’d like to cloudify. By default, the script cloudifies bare metal instances leased from Hetzner. After you cloudify your instance(s), you can provision and manage resources.

# Enter hostname/IP and provider, and install SSH key as instructed by script
docker exec -it ubicloud-app ./demo/cloudify_server

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Create Virtual Machine (VM)

Now, you can log into the console at localhost:3000 and create VMs. Ubicloud will create each VM in a virtual network and assign it private IPv4/IPv6 addresses. It will also assign a public IPv6 address to the VM.

If your ISP doesn’t support IPv6, please use a VPN or tunnel broker such Mullvad or Hurricane Electric’s https://tunnelbroker.net. Alternatively, you could lease IPv4 addresses from your provider and add them to your control plane.