FAQs

@uncloud/run is a container runtime that allows you to spin up your Docker containers on EU cloud servers in literally seconds.

When you run npx @uncloud/run next to a dockerfile, it remotely builds the container and then launches it with a unique URL.

When you change your code, the container is automatically rebuilt and redeployed.

We 💛 our European Cloud providers like Hetzner, OVH, Scaleway, Exoscale, Gcore, StackIT, Upcloud, Leaseweb and the countless others.

They offer a strong, independent, often dramatically cheaper (up to 8x) alternative to US Cloud Providers with true data privacy at their core.

EU Cloud Providers are lacking a few important aspects however that modern cloud-native teams rely on:

• Strong regional focus - EU providers are often focussed on their home-country (Hetzner: 🇩🇪, OVH: 🇫🇷, Exocloud: 🇨🇭, etc.). Modern teams however are used to working with a single platform that scales globally.
• No high-availability topology - EU providers lack the 3-AZ High-Availability topology* that are a crucial element in offering reliable, high-availability, modern cloud services
• Outdated Developer Experience - Cloud Providers in general on average are 10-20 years old at this point. They were simply not designed for a cloud-native / containerized world in mind.

With uncloud, we’re aiming to address these shortcomings by creating a unified cloud platform that’s amazingly easy to use, provides a single point of contact to the EU Cloud ecosystem and is made right here, at home 🇪🇺.

Sounds exciting? Join the mission → Get in touch

*Scaleway is the only provider that offers 3-AZ high-availability throughout their three regions

The docker images you build & deploy when you run npx @uncloud/run are built remotely inside of our cluster.

This has amazing benefits:

• Dramatically faster builds
• Way less network traffic (Docker uploads only the context, not the finished image)
• We can build the image exactly for the architecture it needs
• Built-in caching through our private image registry

What we’re using in the background is a standard Docker feature. Remote builds have been established for a while now and it’s exactly how Docker Build Cloud works.

Every container is launched with 512MB of locally attached, temporary (ephemeral) NVMe storage which is deleted when the container is redeployed. The local storage is mounted in the /data path of your container.

We’ll offer more permanent & scalable storage solutions soon.

Contact Support to get early access.

At the moment, the following cloud providers & regions are available:

• Hetzner - fsn1 🇩🇪

We’ll expand the EU cloud providers & regions you can use with uncloud over time.

Contact Support to request additional EU cloud providers / regions.

Almost! While your data & traffic fully runs on our supported EU cloud providers, we currently still use two AWS services:

• AWS KMS - is used for envelope encryption. It has no direct access to any data.
• AWS Route53 - is used for DNS routing. It helps steer traffic to our load balancer nodes. It has no direct access to any traffic (only the DNS queries)

We aim to find a suitable, European replacement for these in the future.

We’re building uncloud to run exclusively on EU cloud providers so that your data & traffic truly resides within the European Union.

At the moment, we’re almost there with the exception of two AWS services we rely on at the moment:

• AWS KMS - Used for envelope encryption (It never sees your data directly)
• AWS Route53 - Used for DNS routing, so your users traffic never touches AWS, just the initial DNS request

Everything else already runs fully on European Cloud Infrastructure:

• Servers, load balancers, storage: Hetzner
• Backup storage: Scaleway
• Docker Image Registry: Harbor (self-hosted)

During the beta, we only store your server’s data as long as it’s running during an active @uncloud/run session.

Any questions? Contact Support. Or see our official Data Privacy  page.

No, and we don’t have any plans to change that for now. The main reasons for that decision are:

• Open Source brings a ton of collaborators but also more user-support challenges
• We don’t create “new” technology at the moment, instead we combine existing technologies and ensure they run reliably

To be clear: We are standing on the shoulders of giants - uncloud wouldn’t be possible without a vast array of cloud-native Open Source technologies.

We’ll find ways to contribute and give back - even if our main product is not open source at the moment.

Nope - we wish! To even get to a first beta release of this technology took months of hard work.

What you’re looking at is a multi-cloud container runtime across an arbitrary number of European Cloud Providers (which are not the big three), without the need to have one “central” cloud provider serve as the platform for it all.

It’s pretty complex stuff in the background, made deceptively easy for you to use. You’ll see :)