With the recent release of Unfurl 1.0, our open-source tool for deploying services and applications, it’s a good time to step back and try to answer the question: Why Unfurl?
Before getting into the big picture let’s focus on its day-to-day usefulness. How is it helpful? Well, have any of these things happened to you?
This post is about what motivates us to work on this project – our vision of a free and open cloud: what it is, how we can build it, and how it can help create a better Internet.
Practically every time you visit a website or use an app on your phone you are using services running in the cloud. We depend on them to communicate, to learn about the world, to get a job. We’ve come to accept that means entrusting our data and privacy with these opaque, proprietary services. And in turn the overwhelming majority of those services depend on just a handful of cloud providers. (In 2022, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft alone accounted for over 66% of the $217 billion cloud provider marketplace.)
What if we could build cloud applications that were transparent, democratically governed, and independent of the whims of corporations?
We are very excited to publicly release Unfurl Cloud, the first open-source cloud platform!
