Cuemby is a digital infrastructure company building sovereign cloud services for emerging markets. Founded in 2015, with offices in the US and Colombia, Cuemby provides cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes as a service, and managed services across the Americas — with a focus on data sovereignty, no vendor lock-in, and cost efficiency.

Their mission: Give companies in underserved regions the same infrastructure capabilities as hyperscaler customers, without the hyperscaler lock-in or pricing. This is the story of how Unikraft is helping them get there.

The Problem

Cuemby’s managed services (databases like PostgreSQL, caching layers, and other infrastructure primitives) run on traditional virtual machines. When a customer clicks “deploy a PostgreSQL database” in Cuemby’s marketplace, a full legacy VM spins up. This works, but it’s inefficient in three ways that directly limit Cuemby’s growth:

• Density: Each managed service consumes an entire VM’s worth of resources, regardless of actual usage. Where a server could support 10,000 lightweight workloads, it’s capped at roughly 100 VM-based customers.
• Deployment speed: Provisioning a VM-based database takes around 10 minutes. In a world of instant everything, that’s a long wait for a developer clicking “create database.”
• Cost structure: VMs consume resources whether active or idle. For a company serving price-sensitive emerging markets, this overhead directly impacts what they can charge — and how many customers they can profitably serve.

“I truly believe you can do more with less. We don’t need to build 20 more data centers. We can repurpose and be more efficient with the ones that we have.”

— Angel Ramirez, CEO

The Journey: How Cuemby Found Unikraft

Cuemby initially built their platform on Cloud Hypervisor, with custom orchestration layers on top. More efficient than the hyperscalers, but still nowhere near where they wanted to be. The fundamental issue remained: Serving both traditional VM workloads and containerized environments meant picking between two stacks, neither of which was optimally efficient.

Other options fell short:

Firecracker and similar microVM projects: Built for different purposes. They didn’t cover the full set of requirements for running production managed services.

KubeVirt / Harvester: Kubernetes-native VM management. But as Cuemby scaled, these solutions got bloated — lacking functionality and adding operational overhead rather than removing it.

The Solution: Managed Services on Unikraft MicroVMs

Cuemby’s approach is straightforward: Replace the VM layer underneath their existing managed services with the Unikraft platform. Better marketplace experience for the customer, radically different infrastructure underneath.

What Changes for Cuemby

Everything that matters for the business:

Density: 100x improvement. Where Cuemby previously fit around 100 customers on a server, they are fitting 10,000 on the same hardware with Unikraft microVMs. That’s the difference between needing a new machine and needing a new rack.

Deployment speed: Milliseconds. Managed service provisioning drops from the minutes it takes to spin up a legacy VM to the milliseconds it takes to launch a microVM.

Scale-to-zero: Idle services cost nothing. This is what unlocks Cuemby’s most ambitious play: Global and regional deployments where databases run across every server in a region, because scaled-to-zero instances don’t consume resources. A customer choosing “global deployment” gets their database on every Cuemby server across the globe, with a reverse proxy routing to the closest one based on IP. With VMs, this would be economically impossible.

“When the team shared the numbers, I was like — no brainer.”

— Angel Ramirez, CEO & Co-Founder

What Changes for the Customer

Imagine a developer clicks on “deploy PostgreSQL” on Cuemby’s platform. Instead of a full legacy VM, the database runs inside a Unikraft microVM that’s a fraction of the size, boots in milliseconds instead of minutes, and scales to zero in milliseconds when idle. This means drastically faster provisioning, lower cost, and truly global deployments.

Just like before, the developer gets a fully managed database they control 100%. The configuration, access, and developer experience stay identical.

Cuemby’s Vision: Edge-First, Globally Distributed Services

Cuemby is building more than a managed services migration. The combination of the Unikraft platform, Datum’s networking layer, and Cuemby’s orchestration platform creates a next generation distributed edge cloud:

• Unikraft handles the compute — microVM lifecycle, scale-to-zero, isolation, instance forking, etc
• Datum provides the private networking layer across regions
• Cuemby’s orchestration manages provisioning, the marketplace, and a new edge reverse proxy that routes requests to the closest server

The deployment model gives customers two options: Regional (deploy to the closest data center) or global (deploy across all servers in all regions, with traffic automatically routed to the nearest one). Because Unikraft instances scale to zero, global deployment doesn’t mean global cost.

The Collaboration

“Your team is amazing. Very responsive. Always proactive. If there’s something that isn’t clear, they always try to find a way to solve it. That level of support is hard to find. It’s not about hours — it’s about being able to collaborate through the problem.”

— Angel Ramirez, CEO

Cuemby describes the partnership as one where both sides are making real investments — not just financial, but in time, effort, and shared vision. The Unikraft field engineering team has been hands-on through the integration, working through challenges that neither side had fully solved before.

What’s Next

This is phase one. Cuemby’s roadmap with Unikraft extends well beyond managed services:

Full migration of stateless services — Everything that can run as a microVM will be moved to Unikraft.

VM workload migration — Traditional VM services (VDI, full OS environments) are a longer-term target.

Multi-region expansion — As Cuemby adds bare-metal presence in new markets, Unikraft deploys alongside it. Angel’s vision: “I already foresee this becoming the next Cloudflare. Powered by Unikraft, delivered by Cuemby.”

Summary

Cuemby is a digital infrastructure company building sovereign cloud services for emerging markets. Learn more at cuemby.com.

Unikraft Cloud provides millisecond cold starts, transparent scale-to-zero, and hardware-level VM isolation for every workload. Get started or book a call with our CEO Felipe — he is an engineer too, no fluffy sales talk in this conversation :)