What is Narabox?
Narabox turns machines you own into a small cloud. Your team creates containers, virtual machines and networks through a console, a CLI and an API, the way they would in a public cloud, and the hardware stays yours: at home, in the office or in a lab.
Locations
Section titled “Locations”A location is a set of machines running Narabox at one site. You install Narabox on a machine from a USB stick or over the network, and it becomes the location’s first node. Add more machines as you need them. From three nodes on, the location runs its control plane on three of them, so it keeps working when one goes down.
A location is complete on its own. It has its own console, API and accounts, and it needs nothing outside your network to run.
What runs on a location
Section titled “What runs on a location”- Containers. Each account’s containers run inside a lightweight virtual machine on every node, a sandbox, never directly on the node’s own kernel.
- Virtual machines, from cloud images, with their consoles in the browser.
- Bare metal. Whole machines, lent to a project and cleaned when they come back.
- Networks. Each project gets private networks with routers, floating IPs, security groups and load balancers, and can reach your LAN through the external networks you set up.
People and projects
Section titled “People and projects”Everyone signs in with an account, and work is organized in projects. Roles decide who may do what, and quotas decide how much of the location each account may use, so a team can share the same machines without stepping on each other.
The Narabox platform
Section titled “The Narabox platform”The platform at narabox.com is optional. Join a location to it, and your team signs in once to reach every location they use, from anywhere, without opening ports on your network. The location stays in charge: it still decides what each person may do there, and it keeps running if its connection to the platform drops.
Security
Section titled “Security”Sharing hardware means trusting the walls between workloads, so Narabox builds them in on every location:
- containers run in sandbox virtual machines;
- projects’ networks are isolated from each other;
- secrets are encrypted with the location’s key, and each node’s own secrets are sealed to that machine;
- nodes are locked down, with encryption for the data on their disks;
- backups are encrypted before they leave the location;
- every change goes into an audit log whose entries are chained, so it can be verified.
Who it’s for
Section titled “Who it’s for”Homelabs, small teams, small racks, and shared labs: anyone with a few machines who wants the convenience of a cloud without handing over the hardware.
Join the early-access waitlist to try it as it opens up.