Introduction to Brume Cloud

I have been thinking of this idea for a long time: how to reduce the friction of deploying on the cloud as much as possible. I work a lot with very large companies, and most of them have the same struggle: being up to date with the new DevOps good practices like GitOps, ephemeral envs, containers etc., and in general how to write software in good environments. All the time we sell them a Kubernetes cluster, with Helm, OpenTelemetry and Argo CD, with a lot of complex GitLab CI to wrap everything together. This is great, but way too complex for these companies which are only interested in using DevOps ideas, but not having to maintain it. They would prefer running a simple EC2, or a Fargate cluster instead of having to maintain a complex EKS cluster. I have been working on a solution to this problem for a long time, Brume Cloud is the solution I came up with.

Railway and Fly are doing an incredible job at it. These are phenomenal pieces of software, I have used them and still do. But they all have a big pain point: they force you to run on their cloud, on their hardware and all. You never will have access to your machine, its OS, its network connections etc.
Most big companies cannot accept this, mostly for security and governance reasons, and this makes sense. But this means that most professional software development is not running on "cool stacks". Having software run on Railway or Fly feels like magic, everything just works and I think that every developer should be able to experience that. I have been working for more than half a year on a solution to this problem. Trying to reconcile the old professional cloud, hard to move and to modernize, with the new shiny stacks and DevOps workflows.

This is where Brume Cloud (website not created at the time of writing this article, focusing on the core tech) came to life. In French, the brume is the very fine layer of cloud on the ground (translated to "haze" in English), this is the perfect metaphor for this new piece of software. If the developers are on the ground, Brume is the first layer of cloud you see. It does not replace your cloud, but it's the first frontier to it, and will help you go to the cloud.

image of the french Landes with brume

For now, Brume is still in very early alpha, most of the core functionalities have been built (for an alpha), but I still need to work on it before open-sourcing it. I will write a lot more on this project this year, because it has finally reached a point for me where I think this idea is really viable and my take on the subject could interest some people.
This is a very technical project for me, and I want to share with everybody all the different challenges I encountered, all the software decisions I made and all the tools which make everything work. I think open-sourcing is the way to make a software project succeed. Railway and Fly are based on big open-source projects, in my opinion they should be open-sourced (open source does not mean the license is free to use or redistribute).

For now, i’ll share with you some cool screenshot 😇

image of the project overview page in Brume cloud

configuration page of a runner

configuration page of a builder