Horizon Cloud: our own cloud is up and running

For the past months we have been building our own cloud platform, Horizon Cloud. It is now up and running: you can sign in, create a database or a virtual machine, and watch what it uses, all from one console. It is still in development, and we are giving demos to teams who want to pilot it.

Why we are building it

The large clouds are excellent, and also built for large companies. For a developer or a small team, the hard part is often not the technology but the bill: dozens of products, pricing that is hard to predict, and charges in a currency your business does not earn in.

We wanted something simpler. The services most projects actually need, a clear console, and usage priced by the hour in euros, so you pay for what existed while it existed and nothing else.

What is running today

Horizon Cloud is built on Cozystack, an open-source platform on top of Kubernetes. On that foundation we have built and configured:

• Managed virtual machines with their own disks.
• Managed PostgreSQL databases.
• Managed MongoDB databases.
• Backups, so PostgreSQL databases and virtual machines can be restored when something goes wrong.

Databases can be reached securely from outside the platform, so an application running elsewhere can use them directly.

Our own console

The web console is our own work. Instead of long generated forms, it uses designed forms for the common tasks: create a database, create a virtual machine, pick a size. The goal is that a developer who has never used Kubernetes can get a database running without learning it first.

Sign-in and access

Sign-in works with a Microsoft work or school account from any organisation. Inside a team, access is role-based: some people can create and delete resources, others can only use what exists, and others can only look. Each team gets its own space, separated from everyone else's.

Usage you can see

Every resource is metered. Every five minutes the platform records what exists and at what size, and the console shows it back to you: detail for the last day, hourly summaries for the week and daily history for the month. Prices are set per hour in euros for each service. Turning those records into invoices is the next piece we are finishing.

We started with metering on purpose. A pay-as-you-go service is only fair if the customer can check the numbers, so being able to see usage came before being able to bill for it.

Where it stands

Horizon Cloud is in development. It runs, and it does what this post describes. It is not yet a general public service, and we are not pretending it is. The next steps are billing through to a first invoice and growing the platform so it can carry more teams.

That is why we are looking for pilot teams now: developers and small companies who want managed databases and virtual machines without the complexity, and who are willing to tell us honestly what is missing. You get early access and a direct line to the people building it. We get feedback from real projects before the public launch.

Want to see it working? Request a demo of Horizon Cloud.