Open source, built in the open.

Hyper-V is an exceptional hypervisor. After years running it in production — from small businesses to large enterprises — I have never found a reason to question the technology itself. The problem has always been the management tooling around it.

Microsoft gave us System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and it was genuinely great. But it required a separate license, a dedicated server, and its own maintenance burden just to keep the management platform running. Open source alternatives are limited and fragmented. Third-party tools range from expensive to eye-wateringly expensive — for capabilities that should come standard with the platform. Nobody should have to pay thousands of dollars a year to properly manage a hypervisor that Microsoft includes with Windows Server.

My goal is to build the tool that should already exist: a full-lifecycle management platform for Hyper-V and Azure Local — open source, free — that takes any organization from initial design and capacity planning all the way through deployment, daily operations, updates, hardware management, and eventual retirement. Small business with three servers. Large enterprise with three hundred nodes. Same quality of tooling, no licensing fees, no vendor lock-in.

That is the gap. CloudSmith is my attempt to close it. If you share that goal and want to help make it happen, I can always use the help.

— Kris Turner, Hybrid Cloud Solutions