The company has launched an Indiegogo campaign to put together an ambitious $57,000 to add a series of new features, but the company ai...
The company has launched an Indiegogo campaign to put together an ambitious $57,000 to add a series of new features, but the company aims to make complexity with spinning up virtual machines a thing of the past.
“Virtualisation technology is tough,” VirtKick trumpets in a press release. “DigitalOcean did their job and revolutionised the cloud/VPs business. But it doesn’t look that great in [the] open source world.
“Existing open source cloud panels are hard to setup and use – they focus on technological aspects, not users’ needs. VirtKick solves it – it’s an open source cloud panel allowing anyone to become their [own] VPS provider and regain full control over cloud.”
With almost 80,000 followers on Twitter and series A funding of $37.2 million in the bank, cloud hosting firm DigitalOcean is a suitable company to look up to for VirtKick.
As it’s all open source, naturally every line of code the company writes will be available on GitHub. Currently you can spin up a VM in three clicks, as you can see in a demo here, but VirtKick aims in future to be able to do it in one.
“The project is revolutionary,” said VirtKick co-founder Damian Nowak in an email. “There’s no open source project that would simply let users manage their virtualisation without having to dig into configuration files, system internals, networks and such.”
VirtKick is offering ‘bundles’ – tasks to be ticked off as soon as a certain amount of money is raised. $7,000 will enable the one-click install of VMs, $17,000 will enable the implementation of credit card payments and invoices, while later deals hint at partnerships between Amazon, SoftLayer, and MIT among others.
You can take a look at the hosted alpha here and have a play around, and the company’s video below.
Update: CloudTech got an email from Nowak late last night in which he explained the later deals were included more out of not knowing whether they would be useful, rather than anything else. Nowak confirmed a deal with VMware was out, MIT was still going ahead, while VPS providers will be able to buy a dedicated SoftLayer server.
"The thing that hasn't been sneak peeked at all is a federation of home-grown VPS providers," he wrote. "Volunteers will share resources on their computers or servers, whereas open source projects will use them to do whatever they want. Most probably running testse against Dockerfiles, Chef cookbooks, Ansible playbooks, and so on.
"Our small goal of $57,000 can be described as "self-hosted DigitalOcean". Our big goal of $297,000 is "federated VPS for developers," he added.
