Canonical recently announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution designed for scalable clusters and edge deployments. It is aimed at edge computing, as well as for customers in need of a small-scale private cloud.
The company built MicroCloud with simplicity, security, and automation at its core to help minimize the time required for deployment. The company wrote in a blog post:
MicroClouds are optimized for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes.
MicroCloud is a snap package that can automatically configure LXD, Ceph, and OVN across a set of servers. In addition, it relies on mDNS to automatically detect other servers on the network, making it possible to set up a complete cluster by running a single command on one of the machines.
Instance creation (Source: MicroCloud Launch)
MicroCloud components prioritize security through strict confinement, ensuring increased protection, and feature wireless transactional updates that automatically preserve data and roll back on errors, allowing seamless, automatic upgrades to newer versions without downtime and with the flexibility to hold or schedule them as necessary.
Furthermore, MicroCloud is compatible with both standard and high-performance hardware, operating on Ubuntu Desktop, Server, and Ubuntu Core. Workloads in MicroCloud can be executed through Kubernetes or system containers, providing a resource-efficient alternative to traditional virtual machines on LXD, ensuring comparable behavior with bare-metal performance.
A respondent, cloudbonsai on a Reddit thread, wondered what MicroCloud is useful for:
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?
With another trying to responding:
Paraphrased, they are saying LXD is more suited to running VMs or containers and not specifically microservices. It's missing sophisticated cross-container networking, centralized storage management, etc.
So they are pitching a "simpler than K8S, more complicated than LXD" layer on top of LXD for that purpose.
I suppose it also would compete with Proxmox, which is a somewhat different space than K8S. But other things it adds, like the web ui, RBAC, etc...put it in that space also.
Lastly, MicroCloud is offered as a part of Canonicals’ Ubuntu Pro subscription (with different support tiers available). In case a customer already subscribes to the service, they will have full access to the new platform. MicroCloud uses per-node pricing, and the details are available on the pricing page.