I'm building Uncloud — a lightweight clustering and container orchestration tool that lets you deploy and manage web apps across cloud VMs and bare metal with minimal cluster management overhead.

After several years of managing and extending Kubernetes at a unicorn, I realised that I desperately needed a change. All those abstraction layers, unnecessary complexity, boilerplate… I wanted container orchestration to bring me joy again, the way Ansible did when I first tried it a decade ago, or Docker after that.

That’s when I decided to start an experiment that is now called Uncloud. The core design principles I’ve focused on intentionally differ from the traditional container orchestrators like Kubernetes or Docker Swarm:

- No control plane or master nodes – all machines are equal

- P2P state synchronisation

- Imperative operations over state reconciliation (fast feedback, easier troubleshooting)

- Graceful handling of network partitions at the cost of eventual consistency

- No advanced auto-healing or auto-scaling magic – predictable behavior instead

I want well-designed building blocks that just work together. When a service needs high availability, I should be able to scale it across machines and know that if any machine goes down the remaining ones will continue serving traffic. When I deploy, I want immediate feedback, not wondering whether the reconciliation loop will eventually catch up.

GitHub with more technical details and a demo: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud

It's not ready for production use yet, and I'd really love your feedback:

1. Am I alone in wanting a middle ground: something more sophisticated than basic Docker/Compose but without the operational complexity of Kubernetes?

2. If you've moved from platforms like EKS/Heroku/Render/Fly to self-hosting: what was the breaking point and what did you lose or gain in the transition?

3. If you're using tools like Kamal, Dokku, Coolify, or Dokploy, what are your biggest pain points?