Hola.Cloud: The Home-Grown Public Cloud

I have been working for large companies for more than twenty years, and I’ve seen many situations where the company tries to adopt a public cloud as its main infrastructure. But it almost never happens. There are many reasons for this, and one of the biggest ones is price.

At the same time, from time to time I help my friend build things in our spare hours. Over the years, we’ve put together a database, an API gateway, a file server, and even a serverless compute service and logging. One day we looked at all of it and thought: why not put it all together and start a public cloud? And that was the beginning of hola.cloud.

The Api Gateway

Our main piece of infrastructure is the API Gateway. It redirects API calls to your app and provides built-in authentication with Google or GitHub. It also automatically generates Let’s Encrypt certificates for your subdomain. In short, it saves you a lot of time. The same gateway we rely on internally at hola.cloud is also available for your apps, completely transparently.

InceptionDB: The Database

Nothing works without persistence. One of our persistence services is our database, InceptionDB (which also exists as a standalone product). It’s a wild piece of technology—unlike anything I’ve ever built before. Designed as an in-memory journal with powerfull indexing, it’s insanely fast.

Let`s Compute: Lambdas

And of course, you need somewhere to write your code. Our lambdas are simple and easy to use, with built-in authentication and a configuration service. They make it straightforward to get your functions up and running.

The hardest part of all was syncing up with my friend at 11 p.m. and then pushing for three or four hours without falling asleep.

🎉 Today we’re celebrating hola.cloud’s second birthday! Everything is still running in a single-tenant setup, and it has been stable for two years now without any major outages..

And what’s coming next? Honestly, we don’t know. We simply react to what we need, or to what seems interesting at the time. Maybe advanced authorization, maybe some intelligence that lets you query your database in natural language… we’ll see.

Go take a look —it’s free for now. We’d love to hear your feedback