mulgadc/spinifex

Spinifex – Open source AWS-compatible platform for secure edge deployments. Run EC2, VPC, S3, and EBS-like services on bare metal with full control. Built for environments where running in the cloud isn’t an option. Whether you’re deploying to edge sites, private data-centers, or operating in low-connectivity or highly contested environments

Summary

Spinifex is an open-source Go platform that recreates the AWS service surface (EC2, EBS, S3, VPC, IAM, plus EKS, ECS, ECR, RDS, and load balancers) on bare-metal, edge, or on-prem hardware. The same AWS CLI, SDKs, and Terraform configurations that target Amazon can be repointed at a Spinifex cluster without code changes, since the platform speaks the AWS API. The project is released under AGPL-3.0, with a commercial license also available.

What it is useful for

Spinifex fits cases where teams need AWS-style APIs but cannot or do not want to use a public hyperscaler. The README describes three deployment shapes: a partner Neocloud (for GPU capacity without rewriting workloads), an on-premise multi-node cluster, and air-gapped edge sites (vehicles, vessels, factories, clinics) where connectivity is limited or absent. Concrete examples from the README include launching EC2 instances with cloud-init, IMDS metadata, key pairs, tags, spot instances, and GPU passthrough; running managed Kubernetes through EKS on k3s with HA control planes and IAM access entries; storing container images in ECR, backed by the Predastore object store; serving PostgreSQL or MariaDB through RDS with parameter groups and automated backups; and balancing traffic with HAProxy (ALB) or nginx stream (NLB). Block storage is provided by Viperblock (WAL-backed volumes replicated across nodes, exposed over NBD or virtio-blk), object storage by Predastore using Reed-Solomon erasure coding, and DNS by the Northstar authoritative server.

How engineers can use it

For a single-node install on Ubuntu 26.04 or Debian 13, the README documents:

curl -fsSL https://install.mulgadc.com | bash
sudo /usr/local/share/spinifex/setup-ovn.sh --management
sudo spx admin init --node node1 --nodes 1
sudo systemctl start spinifex.target

A Linux bridge must already be configured on the host; the README defers bridge setup details to docs.mulgadc.com. A bootable ISO is also offered for bare-metal hardware. After installation, existing AWS CLI profiles or Terraform code can target the new endpoint, or engineers can sign in to the embedded web console on port 3000 using ~/.aws/credentials from the host. The architecture is message-driven: SigV4-signed requests hit a gateway, are published to NATS, and answered by stateless per-service daemons, with no etcd or external control plane. Documented gaps include Bedrock support scheduled for Q4 2026, and full multi-node HA installation steps that live in the linked documentation rather than the README.