Spinifex v1.0 is out. After 9 months of building in the open (and a much longer period of arguing about what an edge cloud should actually be), the first version we're willing to call "1.0" is on GitHub and free to deploy.
1.0 is the version that delivers on a single promise: take the AWS primitives your team already knows (EC2 instances, EBS volumes, S3 buckets) and run them on hardware you own, in places where the cloud isn't an option. No phone-home. No external control plane. No convergence on someone else's region.
What's in the box
1.0 ships three services, all of them open source under AGPL-3.0:
- Spinifex Compute: EC2-compatible VM orchestration on QEMU/KVM, with cloud-init metadata, instance types, and full lifecycle management. Launch it with the AWS CLI you already have installed.
- Viperblock: EBS-compatible block storage with WAL backing, snapshots, replication, and an in-memory hot path. Volumes attach via NBD or virtio-blk.
- Predastore: S3-compatible object storage with SigV4 auth, multipart uploads, and erasure coding designed to survive node loss in distributed deployments.
Why we built it
The defence operators we'd been talking to all had the same story. They'd invested heavily in cloud-native skills, tooling, and architectures (Terraform, IaC, Kubernetes, the works) and then ran straight into the realities of forward deployment. Disconnected sites. Contested networks. Sovereignty constraints. Reach-back to AWS isn't a strategy when the link is a satellite hop you no longer have, signals are jammed, and that severed submarine cable is no longer routing packets.
We built Spinifex because the available answers were unsatisfying. Buy a proprietary appliance and re-platform. Run a private OpenStack cloud and accept the operational tax. Take the leap to BYO custom Linux stack to emulate a hyperscaler and realise your team are spinning wheels and should focus on your core product. Or accept that "edge" means a stripped-down facsimile of the cloud you actually have.
Spinifex's pitch is simpler. Run the same APIs you'd run in the cloud, on the same hardware you already own, with no expectation that any third party is reachable. When connectivity is available, you can use it. When it isn't, nothing changes.
Open source, on purpose
Spinifex is AGPL-3.0. The source is open and freely available, and we take pull requests. A commercial license is available for organisations that need to deploy outside the terms of the AGPL (most defence and industrial operators take this path), but the code itself is, and will remain, readable and modifiable.
This is deliberate. The whole point of the system is that it doesn't have a hidden control plane. If you can't audit it, you can't trust it. So you can audit it.
Get started
The 1.0 release includes a bootable ISO, a tarball for existing Linux installs, and pre-built container images. The documentation site has a quick-start that takes you from cold metal to a running EC2-compatible instance in about ten minutes.
We'd love to hear what you build with it. Open an issue, send us a note, or just deploy it somewhere at the edge and tell us how it went.
