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Datum is building the internet for AI.

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Why Datum?

We believe that AI is changing everything — not just how we work and create, but how quickly new applications, agents, and clouds are being built.

The Internet is built on data center meet-me rooms, where telco providers and hyperscaler clouds talk to each other over real physical cables, called cross-connects. A new connection takes days or weeks of humans moving things around to set up.

We believe the next era of the Internet is already here, and it's growing fast. In the alt-cloud universe, you don't think about virtual machines and VPCs, you think about services. You connect your Vercel app with your Supabase instance all wired up with your Kestra workflow, monitored by your favorite SRE agent. There isn't a switch or routing table in sight. It's just virtual plumbing to make your business go, powered by a fleet of agents.

With Datum, cloud and AI-native builders can use the tools they love (like Claude, Cursor or a Kubernetes native CLI) to access the internet superpowers that today’s tech giants leverage at scale: authoritative DNS, edge proxies, global backbones, deterministic routing, cloud on-ramps, and private interconnection.

That's why we're building Datum: to help build 1k clouds in the age of AI.

So what is Datum?

An open network cloud built for AI

  • Developer and agent-friendly protocols, interfaces, and workflows
  • Backed by an AGPvL 3.0 license
  • Powerful suite of infrastructure primitives, deployed at the edge
  • Built using Kubernetes API patterns for operator tooling and familiarity (datumctl, Helm, etc.)
  • Flexible deployment models (public cloud, managed cloud, BYOC, OSS)

Neutral & flexible by design

  • Ecosystem friendly partner model
  • No allegiance to a single cloud, vendor, or region
  • Operates as a trusted, independent layer for alt clouds, incumbents, and digital-first enterprises
  • Feed full telemetry to your preferred tools (Grafana Cloud, etc)

Key features

Declarative management

Our most important feature isn't a "what" but a "how". Datum works just like Kubernetes, because it is Kubernetes. Define your desired infrastructure state and our components reconcile the living system to match. No more syncing or drift.

The Datum control plane is natively compatible with tooling from the Kubernetes ecosystem. Datum APIs are defined as [Custom Resources][k8s-custom-resources], and resources are managed by operators which can be deployed into any Kubernetes cluster.

Use the tools you're familiar with, but especially datumctl for interacting with API resources via the CLI. Read more about datumctl here.

AI Edge

An Envoy-based edge that provides an intelligent HTTPProxy along with a Coraza-based Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect and route internet traffic to backend services. We support HTTP(S) 1.1, HTTP2, gRPC, and WebSockets.

Galactic VPCs

Internet backbones weren't designed for most humans, let alone agents. Our Galactic VPC feature is built for an agentic world to provide policy-driven SRv6 virtual backbones that go anywhere.

UFOs

We've partnered with Unikraft to build out a modern edge compute layer that is ideal for agentic and network use cases. "Unikernel Function Offloads" provide 100% isolation, millisecond cold starts, and scale to zero snapshotting.

Connectors

We plan to support all kinds of connections, from developer-focused (e.g. Tailscale Tailnets, Wireguard VPNs) to low level L2/L3 telco (AWS Direct Connect, Equinix Fabric, Megaport Onramps, etc). We've started with QUIC-based tunnels powered by the Iroh protocol.

Essentials

We support a growing collection of features that help make agentic and internet scale applications "go". While these may not be the star of any show, they are necessary ingredients.

  • Authoritative DNS
  • Domain resource tracking
  • Fine grained roles and permissions
  • Secrets & machine accounts
  • Activity logs

Components

Datum API server

We deploy a Datum variant of the Kubernetes api-server in the style of the generic control plane (KEP-4080) so that we can leverage the vast ecosystem of libraries and tooling. There is no need to design a bespoke, infrastructure-focused distributed system for you to learn; Kubernetes has the primitives to support it. While the standard api-server operates normally for the cluster itself (think Pods and Deployments), Datum's api-server handles Datum-specific resources like Network and Workload.

Manages networking primitives like Datum VPC Networks (Network,NetworkContext), Subnets (SubnetClaim, Subnet), IP Address Management(IPAM), and network policy concepts (NetworkBinding, NetworkPolicy).

Manages the lifecycle of Workload resources, handling placement logic and the creation of compute instances (WorkloadDeployment, Instance) via infrastructure providers. See the Workloads RFC for design details.


Get Started

The easiest way to understand Datum is to try it! Head over to Datum Cloud, sign up, and check out our docs to get started.

We hope that you will then come and build with us:

License

Datum is primarily licensed under the AGPL v3.0. Specific components mayhave different licenses; please check individual repositories for details.

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An open network cloud that you can run anywhere, backed by open source.

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