For the past few years, cloud has been one of the biggest buzzwords among technology enthusiasts. Whether you want data accessibility across devices or need computation power for your business or even develop applications—cloud can help you.

With growing adoption for cloud computing, almost everyone from individuals to large corporations are leveraging it. For example CERN, the famous European nuclear lab, uses OpenStack to manage their IT infrastructure. Several open source projects related to cloud computing have also come up in last few years, prominent among them are ownCloud, OpenStack etc.

Setting up and managing cloud infrastructure can have its own set of challenges. For a novice who has little or no technical background, it can take a lot of work to set up a cloud by themselves. Another challenge, at least with public clouds, is privacy. Once data is uploaded to a cloud server, you can’t really be sure of who is seeing it. The recent iCloud, Sony hacking attacks have shed some light on security best practices in the cloud.

What is Virtkick?

Virtkick, a new cloud infrastructure management tool, aims to solve these two main problems. Founders claim Virtkick is dead easy to install and use, and by hosting your cloud infrastructure in your own premises you can be sure that there is no else with access to your data. Lets first take a look at how cloud works and where Virtkick fits in.

You may be aware that cloud is actually a network of computers working together to give users an illusion of interacting with a single computer. To simplify things, you can imagine three layers, first the hardware (the actual servers), second the virtualization layer (the layer which creates illusion), and third the software layer (software like ownCloud) that users interacts with. As you’d have guessed by now, Virtkick belongs to the second layer. But there is more to it, not only does it help in virtualizing the hardware, it also serves as the panel for managing the different virtual machines you create—in a simple and easy to use interface.

See the Virtkick demo.

Some of the interesting Virtkick features are:

Mount ISO packages: Install most popular systems, Ubuntu, CentOS, Arch and more. Install appliances: Deliver appliances with various Linux distributions (coming soon). One click integration with sandstorm (coming soon).

Virtkick also opens up a new opportunity for Virtual Private Servers (VPS) and data center professionals. It ships with optional e-commerce features, so VPS providers can use them to run their business and sell virtual machines. Since VirtKick is all free, it makes costly software obsolete thatis needed to run such a business, so providers can offer more for less.

Download Virtkick from their GitHub page.

Launched on October 29, 2014, VirtKick has already received 1000 email subscriptions, around 800 GitHub downloads, and 15,000 visitors. A successful example of crowdfunding, Virtkick crowdfunded their way to this level. They raised $4,216 via IndieGoGo and $18k from a startup accelerator, taking the total amount to $22,216. Though the IndieGoGo campaign is over now, you can still contribute contribute. You can also read about the team behind Virtkick.

Let us know your views in the comments!