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Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

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Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

#12
post #6

One of the most important things when managing data is not losing it. Does this have a solution for doing backups built in or do you come up with your own solution like using something your web host provides?

I haven't used this myself but it looks like it uses nightly encrypted backups using Tarsnap

Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

#13
post #4

Does anyone here on HN have experience using Sovereign in a team setting? I have a few questions: * Mobile contact and calendar syncing : How well and reliably does it work? * Calendar group features : how well do they work? * Setup and maintenance : how much hassle is involved?

Doing that stuff is hard.

Sovereign doesn't solve all your operational problems.

I think it's suitable for personal use. I wouldn't run it in a production setting without thoroughly understanding all parts of the stack.

I would say it's good for personal use or to demonstrate what ansible is capable of.

Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

#15
post #8
post #2

For my fellow HNers, this is "private cloud" in the meaning of Owncloud, not of Openstack.

I hear about Nextcloud a lot more than I hear about Owncloud. Does anyone know why this project uses Owncloud instead of Nextcloud?

This project started before Nextcloud existed, I don't know why it hasn't switched, though.

Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

#16
post #8
post #2

For my fellow HNers, this is "private cloud" in the meaning of Owncloud, not of Openstack.

I hear about Nextcloud a lot more than I hear about Owncloud. Does anyone know why this project uses Owncloud instead of Nextcloud?

Based on how long this project has existed, I suspect they chose owncloud before nextcloud was forked and changing it hasn't happened/some people don't want to change their already working installations.

Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

#17
This is a pretty cool setup! I have been tinkering in the self-hosting world for awhile now and I would say my biggest piece of advice is to learn Docker. (Not trying to shill for Docker here or start a Docker vs. Ansible flame war.) In my personal experience, Docker images (and docker-compose orchestrations) are more pervasive than Ansible playbooks and when it comes to self-hosting for personal use, hosting all my services in Docker has made it much easier to deploy/maintain them. (Not speaking to business use cases since in that situation you should really have a deep familiarity with your tech stack and be able to roll-your-own Ansible playbook/Dockerfiles.)

Also, there are so many great FLOSS alternatives to Google Apps. This repo contains some, but here are some of my favorites:

* Drive/Calendar/Photos/Keep:

  - https://nextcloud.com/ (I prefer this over OwnCloud)
* Docs/Sheets/Slides

  - https://www.onlyoffice.com/
* Mail

  - https://mailu.io/ (basically a Docker-based deployment of Postfix/Dovecot/etc)
* Hangouts

  - Server - https://matrix.org/

  - Client - https://about.riot.im/

  - (I prefer Matrix.org over Jabber/XMPP)
* G+/Twitter

  - https://joinmastodon.org/

Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

#18

This is a pretty cool setup! I have been tinkering in the self-hosting world for awhile now and I would say my biggest piece of advice is to learn Docker. (Not trying to shill for Docker here or start a Docker vs. Ansible flame war.) In my personal experience, Docker images (and docker-compose orchestrations) are more pervasive than Ansible playbooks and when it comes to self-hosting for personal use, hosting all my…

Are there any resources you recommend for learning to use Docker specifically for self-hosted services in a home lab setting?

Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

#19
There are so many servers and apps being installed by Sovereign that I'm certain few would be able to keep it secure (https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign/wiki/Software-used-by...). The big win for the cloud is that you're paying a fraction of the cost for access to a, typically, enormous security and operations team. If you want to build software like this that allows people to self-host, you need to scale down what you deploy to what a single person can reasonably manage. This isn't it.

Fun todo: Install this somewhere, nmap it for open ports, then ask "How many of these services had a remotely exploitable CVE in the last year?" "If one of these services had one tomorrow, would I know to patch it and take action faster than someone would takeover my box?" I don't see any containment mechanisms on any of these services beyond what's included by default so a compromise of one service likely leads to total compromise of the entire box.

I had to think about this a lot with AlgoVPN (https://github.com/trailofbits/algo), and we built a system with no out-of-the-box remote administration, strong isolation between services with AppArmor, CPU accounting, and privilege reductions, and limited third party dependencies and software. You can't count on a full-time, expert system administrator.

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