Photo: Umur Cubukcu, Ozgun Erdogan, and Daniel Farina (left to right) are the founders of Ubicloud.
A new business called Ubicloud has made a bold move to disrupt the market by offering a concept aiming to challenge the dominance of heavyweight cloud hosting providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Ubicloud was founded by the seasoned team behind Citus Data, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2019. The startup instantly received $16M in venture money.
The cloud hosting services startup aims to provide an open-source, less costly cloud computing offering. Ubicloud has built its cloud solutions on top of bare-metal servers provided by AWS, Leaseweb, OVH Cloud, and Hetzner. Through a TechCrunch story, the cloud company announced its debut.
Initially, Ubicloud is primarily focused on two product offerings that are basic but crucial: computing power and a PostgreSQL database service. A managed and open-source version of Ubicloud’s core cloud computing services are available. According to Ubicloud itself, their new cloud initiative will offer developers significant cost savings over the industry heavyweights, in addition to granting them autonomy in designing their own cloud architecture.
The adoption of PostgreSQL is a reflection of the founders’ previous success with Citus Data, which also made use of database technology. In addition, attribute-based access controls and fundamental networking resources for creating private and public virtual networks are included in Ubicloud’s first cloud release. The startup plans to expand its cloud service offering to include block storage and a Kubernetes-based container service.
Citus Data
Ozgun Erdogan, Umur Cubukcu, and Daniel Farina, the creators of Ubicloud, all have a background in cloud computing. Their combined experience includes significant contributions to several Microsoft Azure core services, Citus Data’s successful launch, and Heroku PostgreSQL. Their experiences at Y Combinator’s summer 2011 cohort Citus Data and their subsequent roles at Microsoft have given them a unique insight on the benefits and drawbacks of the cloud.
Mr. Cubukcu in particular has mixed feelings about the cloud, acknowledging its need and the opportunities it has created but still seeing room for improvement and simplicity. Therefore, rather than attempting to replicate AWS’s extensive service catalog, Ubicloud aims to pinpoint the primary advantages offered by a carefully selected set of the latter's many services. By doing this, Ubicloud intends to provide developers a more straightforward and reasonably priced choice.
Founded in 2010 by Ozgun Erdogan and Sumedh Pathak, Citus Data, which Microsoft acquired in 2019, improved PostgreSQL database scalability with its sharding technology. Thanks to its technology, PostgreSQL may now be used as a distributed database, allowing for horizontal scalability via data splitting over many servers. Large datasets, real-time analytics, and massive transaction volumes are all made possible by this innovation, which significantly improves query efficiency and scalability.
The solution from Citus Data suited to a wide variety of applications, from startups to major companies and was offered as both an open-source extension and a managed cloud service. With Citus Data's technology incorporated into Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Microsoft managed to improve the scalability and performance of its cloud platform. This action supported the acceptance of PostgreSQL as an enterprise-grade, scalable solution and confirmed the significance of Citus Data’s innovative technology.
Read the full article about Ubicloud on Techcrunch here.
