A single VM is indeed the most pragmatic setup that most apps really need. However I still prefer to have at least two for little redundancy and peace of mind. It’s just less stressful to do any upgrades or changes knowing there is another replica in case of a failure.

And I’m building and happily using Uncloud (https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud) for this (inspired by Kamal). It makes multi-machine setups as simple as a single VM. Creates a zero-config WireGuard overlay network and uses the standard Docker Compose spec to deploy to multiple VMs. There is no orchestrator or control plane complexity. Start with one VM, then add another when needed, can even mix cloud VMs and on-prem.

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ozim 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

People have it backwards.

If you have an app and you want to run a single app yeah silly to look for K8s.

If you have a beefy server or two you want to utilize fully and put as many apps on it without clashing dependencies you want to use K8s or docker or other containers. Where K8s enables you to go further.

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sgt 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That looks pretty interesting. Is it being used in production yet (I mean serious installs) ?

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psviderski 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes but at small scale. Myself and a handful of others from our Discord run it in production. The core build/push/deploy workflows are stable and most of the heavy lifting at runtime is done by battle-tested projects: Docker, Caddy, WireGuard, Corrosion from Fly.io.

Radboud University recently announced they're rolling it out for managing containers across the faculty which is the most "serious install" I know about, but there could be other: https://cncz.science.ru.nl/en/news/2026-04-15_uncloud/

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sgt 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Did you improve the security concerns? E.g the way it executes in a `curl | bash` level. I was a bit concerned about that.

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projektfu 6 hours ago | parent [-]

TBF, the documentation says you can download and review the script, then run it. Or use other methods like a homebrew or (unofficial) Debian package, or you can just install the binary where you want it, which is all the install.sh script (107 lines, 407 words) does.

https://uncloud.run/docs/getting-started/install-cli/#instal...

	▲	sgt 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I mean how commands are run on the servers - indirectly or indirectly. It's likely a code quality issue?

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dzonga 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

this is dope work.