We’re building a new sovereign cloud platform for Canada 🇨🇦 – starting with static sites and CDN, and soon containers, object storage, and DNS.

To run cloud infrastructure in Canada, it’s always been at the feet of foreign companies: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle… We’ve piggy-backed on American tech for decades, and so local options have been scarce and under-developed.

But, this reliance on US cloud providers has exposed most Canadian citizens and businesses to US policies like the “Cloud Act” and “Patriot Act”. These invasive policies cross borders and threaten the privacy and security of Canadians’ data, even when it physically resides on Canadian soil.

Worktree started earlier this year by fostering a community around a Git and DevOps platform built on top of Gitea. To do this, we needed to set up scalable server infrastructure, and after an exhaustive and exhausting search, we settled on using AWS, an American cloud provider with a region in Montréal.

This was a compromise to get what we needed quickly. Many people have voiced their concerns about a Canadian-focused service’s dependence on Amazon for cloud infrastructure, and rightly-so. The fact is, there just isn’t a Canadian-owned cloud platform that even remotely compares to what the foreign incumbents offer. It simply does not exist.

It’s time for change. It’s time for Worktree Cloud.

We can’t build an entire Cloud in a day, so we have built a roadmap to get us there one product at a time. The first products are available now: Sites and CDN. These are available in our first region: Montréal (qc-south-1).

With this, you can deploy your static site to Worktree Cloud and have it available automatically on *.worktree.site. If you add a CDN Endpoint to your site, you can map a custom domain, with free TLS from Let’s Encrypt, and see basic traffic analytics.

Sites are a flat-rate of $5 per site, and CDN Endpoints are free – you just pay for bandwidth ($0.10/GB) and request volume ($1/million requests).

Check out the docs for more details.

Static sites are great, but we have much larger ambitions for Worktree Cloud. Our goal is to build a platform capable enough to run Worktree itself, which requires modern cloud features like containers, load balancers, object storage, and databases.

That’s why all of those things are on our roadmap.

We’re already starting to build the next phase of Worktree Cloud: storage and compute. We’re building a full PaaS with a container runtime, private networking, dualstack floating IPs, block and object storage, and automatic load balancing.

We can’t wait to share more as we unlock each piece of this roadmap in the coming months.

Worktree Cloud is a from-scratch cloud platform. We’re not building on top of any existing product like OpenStack or VMWare. This was a conscious decision with significant long-term benefits.

OpenStack is more of a burden than a benefit in almost every case. It’s slow, legacy-ridden, over-engineered, and difficult to operate. VMWare even more so, with the added burden of proprietary licensing.

By owning our own runtimes, hypervisors, and control plane, we control the customer experience. The big cloud providers know this, and that’s why none of them use off-the-shelf platforms like OpenStack (even smaller players like Linode or DigitalOcean). They can push innovation at the lowest levels of their stack, and build products that leverage low-latency, tightly-integrated infrastructure – such as “micro-vms” like AWS Firecracker, or feature-rich integrated platforms like Azure Storage.

This ambitious goal sets Worktree Cloud apart from the competition, and will allow us to provide an unparalleled experience in the Canadian Cloud marketplace. Unfortunately, it also means that launching these storage- and compute-based products won’t be immediate, as we have to build the foundations first.

We’re already testing an internal version of our object storage service, which will soon power Sites and Worktree itself. Stay tuned!

We’re a bootstrapped company. We don’t have Big Tech money to spend on building out net-new datacentres, or buy loads of server hardware and IP space up front. For this initial launch of Worktree Cloud, we’re leasing bare metal servers and IP space from OVH, a French company with a large presence in Montréal.

Similar to AWS, this is technically a foreign company operating in Canada. But unlike AWS, the architecture we’ve built can be directly translated to our own equipment in the future.

Our goal is, of course, to purchase our own IP blocks, hardware, and rackspace. By using Worktree and Worktree Cloud today, you’re helping us towards this goal.

If you’re a Canadian company and want to help drive the future of sovereign clouds in Canada by sponsoring server hardware, IP space, or rackspace for Worktree, please reach out; we’d love to talk.

Anyone with a Worktree account can start using Worktree Cloud today. If you don’t have a Worktree account yet, sign up for free.