27–28 Mar 2026
Africa/Nairobi timezone

LXD in Production: Building a Cost-Effective Private Cloud on Bare Metal for African Deployments

27 Mar 2026, 11:30
30m
Cloud computing

Speaker

Mucheru Maina

Description

Managing cloud infrastructure in Africa comes with unique constraints — high AWS/Azure costs, unreliable connectivity, and the need to serve multiple markets efficiently. This talk explores how LXD can be used to build a robust, production-grade private cloud on bare metal servers, dramatically reducing infrastructure costs without sacrificing reliability or flexibility.
Drawing from real-world experience managing hybrid infrastructure across 8 African markets, this session covers: setting up and managing LXD clusters on bare metal, designing container profiles and storage pools for multi-tenant workloads, networking strategies including bridged and OVN networking, practical operational lessons — backups, monitoring, and day-2 operations.
Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of when LXD makes sense over VMs or Kubernetes, and a practical blueprint for deploying it in production.

Justification

LXD is a Canonical-backed technology that remains underutilized across African infrastructure teams, despite being one of the most cost-effective virtualization solutions available. This talk brings real production experience from a hybrid cloud deployment spanning 8 African countries, making it directly relevant to engineers and organizations in the region looking to reduce cloud spend while maintaining operational excellence. UbuCon Kenya is the ideal venue to showcase this Ubuntu-native solution to a local technical audience.

Technical level intermediate
Where are you based? Nairobi, Kenya
Submission type Talk

Presentation materials