Welcome to part one of the Getting to Know CubeCOS Series, where we explore CubeCOS, the open source platform, break down its components, and share practical guides to help you get started. In this blog post, I will cover CubeCOS, its origins, and what's next.
CubeCOS is a free and open-source platform that brings together Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). With opinionated best practices and pre-configured defaults, it enables you to set up production-ready infrastructure quickly. Built on OpenStack and tightly integrated with Kubernetes, CubeCOS automates your infrastructure stack to deliver a seamless, public cloud–like experience through its self-service portal.
Designed to scale from edge to data center, CubeCOS delivers reproducible environments that streamline resource management for developers and reduce operational overheads for administrators and operators.
In 2016, we observed three trends in the cloud/ enterprise computing space that raised questions about the future of virtualized infrastructure.
Baremetal was fading fast and replaced by the hypervisor, with the best options locked behind a proprietary stack.
As containerization matured, it was no longer a development or test tool. Kubernetes introduced orchestration to scale, while demanding a more flexible and robust underlying infrastructure.
Cloud providers stopped being "another choice for compute" and became an integrated ecosystem. But that didn't mean all workloads were suitable for the cloud.
These three shifts left us with a bigger question: is there a better solution that could tackle all three challenges? It became clear that the available solutions fell into three distinct camps, each with trade-offs that left a noticeable gap in the market.
From our experience, the on-premise virtualization infrastructure space can be divided into three categories:
Each addressed part of the problem, but the gap remained: an out-of-the-box, reliable, open-source platform.
The gap shaped our approach. We sought an open-source virtualization platform that offered an enterprise-grade experience without vendor lock-in.
Picture 2: Choosing between integration on commercial foundations vs building CubeCOS from scratch
The first path risks locking us into someone else's product and the platform's constraints, which was what we wanted to avoid. We chose the second path to take complete control, selecting, integrating, and operating every component ourselves.
With that decided, we started designing our requirements: open source, production-ready, compatible with modern workloads, and maintainable. We mapped capabilities to existing projects, including hypervisor, storage backend, networking, orchestration, and monitoring, and filled any gaps with additional tooling.
Then came the implementation phase, which involved deploying, operating, and maintaining our platform. This is where we hit the first challenges.
Our challenges can be divided into three major categories that we aim to tackle with CubeCOS.
To meet the defined requirements, CubeCOS required over 40 open source integrations. Integrating the individual tools and projects manually was arduous, time-consuming, and prone to human error.
Working with separate command-line operations, management interfaces, and domain knowledge taxed our developers and operators.
We didn't have a reliable way to test and validate new features or upgrades without risking breakage. This limited the long-term usability and maintainability of CubeCOS.
Picture 3: Illustration of orchestrating all the relevant components required
We could deploy the stack, but the challenge was the ongoing integration and maintenance of the platform. The available tools we explored solved deployment or integration, but rarely both. Most of the tools we tried solved one piece of the puzzle, but none could manage the entire lifecycle.
That's why we built Hex Bedrock, a custom framework that brings reproducible deployments, service orchestration, and operation automation. We will cover how it works in our upcoming CubeCOS Deep Dive Series.
At a high level, Hex is the core foundation of the CubeCOS platform, providing:
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With Hex, CubeCOS becomes easier to deploy, operate, and maintain at scale. Next, we’ll look at the problems CubeCOS addresses and the types of workloads it supports.
CubeCOS targets one primary problem: the operational complexity of OpenStack. By abstracting away the deployment, integration, and lifecycle management, it delivers a consistent experience for administrators, operators, and developers — whether the workload is small-scale or cloud-scale.
Through Hex, CubeCOS handles the integration, orchestration, and operation of the OpenStack cluster. Delivering an operational, production-ready environment without manual service setup or much configuration.
CubeCOS integrates Kubernetes natively, allowing clusters to consume OpenStack resources directly. Each Kubernetes cluster can be placed in individual tenants, with isolated compute, storage, and network allocations, to maximize utilization and support multi-tenant, cloud-scale workloads.
CubeCOS is 100% open source under the Apache 2.0 license. It is designed so that the community building it can run, maintain, and extend it.
By addressing deployment complexity, Kubernetes integration, and vendor lock-in, CubeCOS will power your virtualization infrastructure. We have proven CubeCOS in production across different environments and scales.
Over the past few years, we have deployed CubeCOS as a closed-source platform, using production feedback to refine and align it with enterprise requirements. Our partners and adopting organizations have deployed CubeCOS for:
Act as the infrastructure foundation for both virtualized and containerized workloads.
Serves as the foundation platform for providers delivering multi-tenant IaaS and PaaS offerings.
Optimized builds that deliver the same capabilities in a reduced footprint for location-specific workloads.
Tell us how you apply CubeCOS. Share your workloads and use cases with us on GitHub Discussions or our community channels!
We are committed to following the Four Open principles (open source, open design, open development, open community) defined by the OpenInfra foundation and to growing the CubeCOS community into a self-sustaining, community-led project.
In the upcoming releases, our road map includes:
The CubeCOS community is growing, and your participation matters. Contribute, report bugs, share ideas, and help shape the future of open on-premise cloud infrastructure.
Collaborate with us on GitHub discussions, view the list of open issues, and join our community channels.
CubeCOS is a free and open-source cloud virtualization platform that simplifies OpenStack deployment and provides native Kubernetes integration. It offers a cloud-like experience for running virtual machines and containers across edge and private cloud environments.
CubeCOS addresses the complexity, fragmentation, and vendor lock-in typically found in traditional virtualization platforms. It fills the gap with a fully open source, enterprise-ready stack built on OpenStack, designed for simplicity and flexibility.
CubeCOS uses Hex Bedrock, a custom orchestration framework that automates deployment, integration, and operation. It reduces operational overhead and enables reproducible lifecycle management at any scale.
CubeCOS can be deployed in private clouds, public clouds, and edge environments. Designed to provide flexibility and power for both large-scale data center deployments and resource-constrained edge environments.
Upcoming features include support for external storage systems, deeper health automation, a more intuitive UI experience, and advanced monitoring capabilities in future releases. CubeCOS is developed in the open with a growing, community-led ecosystem.