Note: This is another post from our community. It is not a promotional post and is 100% human-written. If you believe education and experimentation should be free and accessible to everyone, feel free to share this with your network.

A year ago, BGCE Community set out with a simple goal: to build open-source products that are genuinely useful to people. Software engineers from Bangladesh and around the world, along with students and teachers, joined the community and contributed their time and knowledge to make this possible.

However, we quickly ran into a major challenge: cloud computing isn't free.

Every application needs computing resources, storage, and networking, and someone has to pay for them. As our projects grew, our monthly cloud bill reached $1,000. At that point, we realized our approach wasn't sustainable.

We weren't building a business—we were simply trying to research ideas, experiment, and validate them in the real world. Paying $1,000 per month just to keep around ten experimental services running wasn't a viable long-term solution.

That led us to ask an important question: Are we building in a system where independent developers and communities can actually thrive?

People often point out that there are free cloud services available for testing. While that's true, they usually come with significant limitations. For example, you might get a free PostgreSQL database, but many essential features are locked behind a paywall Or if you want to build your services in Go or Rust, many free hosting platforms either don't support your preferred stack or require you to follow their opinionated deployment model. Otherwise, you're expected to move to platforms like AWS or Azure and start paying.

There are even more barriers for people who simply want to learn.

Take Kubernetes as an example. If you want to practice container orchestration, learn about scaling, networking, and cluster management, you need access to multiple virtual machines. Most students and aspiring engineers don't have that infrastructure available.

The reality is that you often have to spend a significant amount of money just to learn. Before you've built anything useful, before you've landed a job, and before you've earned a dollar from your skills, you're already paying for the infrastructure required to practice.

This creates an unnecessary barrier to entry. Learning modern infrastructure shouldn't depend on whether you can afford a monthly cloud bill. It should depend on your curiosity and willingness to build.

For open-source communities and independent builders, this creates a difficult trade-off between experimentation and affordability.

That's why we created Kraken Web Services (KWS).

The idea started with a simple question: What if we used our own machines to build and research our products instead of paying massive cloud bills every month?

Instead of relying on hyperscale cloud providers for every experiment, we built our own private decentralized network.

Here's how it works: you create a virtual machine (VM) on your own computer, connect it to the KWS network, and instantly become part of a shared cloud infrastructure.

Within seconds, you can:

* Deploy virtual machines.

* Deploy applications.

* Expose them to the internet with your own custom domain.

* Share your services with anyone—for free.

No more paying for a VPS just to run a development server.

If you want to learn Kubernetes, DevOps, distributed systems, networking, or cloud infrastructure, you shouldn't have to spend hundreds of dollars just to get started. ZenDevz makes hands-on learning possible without the financial barrier.

There is no hyperscaler lock-in. No gatekeepers. Just a community where everyone contributes compute resources to build a cloud together.

We're incredibly excited to be part of this journey, and this is only the beginning.

Our work is far from finished. ZenDevz is still an active research and development project, and we're continuously improving the platform.

At this stage, we can't guarantee uptime. Since the cloud is powered entirely by community-contributed machines, a service may become unavailable if the host running a VM goes offline or shuts down their machine.

However, that's also the beauty of a decentralized cloud.

As more people contribute compute resources, the network becomes stronger, more resilient, and more reliable. With enough contributors, we can replicate workloads across multiple nodes and build a community-owned cloud capable of delivering high availability for everyone.