Every cloud provider sells the same pitch: focus on your code, we'll handle the rest. But "the rest" comes with vendor lock-in, unpredictable billing, and zero visibility into what's actually running your workloads. xsubi started as a rejection of that trade-off.
The idea was simple: take enterprise-grade hardware — Dell PowerEdge R720s pulled from data center rotation — and build a cloud platform that I fully control. Not reselling AWS. Not marking up DigitalOcean droplets. Actual bare metal, in my possession, running KVM and Hyper-V side by side.
The first version was rough. A single server, manual VM provisioning, SSH for everything. But it worked, and more importantly, I understood every layer of the stack. When something broke at 2 AM, I didn't open a support ticket — I fixed it. That direct ownership changed how I think about infrastructure.
Today xsubi runs on multiple hypervisors, orchestrated by Kubernetes, monitored by Prometheus and Grafana, with automated provisioning through FastAPI host agents. The architecture is documented, the deployment is repeatable, and every component is something I chose deliberately — not something a cloud provider chose for me.
Building your own cloud isn't for everyone. It requires hardware investment, Linux administration skills, and the willingness to be your own SRE. But if you value transparency, control, and understanding your stack top to bottom, there's nothing quite like it.