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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

#31

Post by OJFord »

slowhand09 wrote: post #23
OJFord wrote: post #3

Isn't this just duplicating effort that's probably already been done, in many cases by the first-party maintainers, in Dockerfiles? I don't mean to start 'Docker vs. Ansible', I just wonder why if you wanted a quick way to setup a single-server 'own private cloud' you wouldn't just go with what already exists, and list the images you want in a docker-compose.yaml file? (Which would additionally set you up for 'scalin…

This is dated 2015. I hadn't heard of Docker in 2015.

That's as may be, but it did exist, and was popular.

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

#32

Post by PaulRobinson »

dguido wrote: post #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…

fail2ban and rkhunter are in the kit, and that offsets some of the issues: you get some assurance and protection right there out of the box.

You can also comment out the bits you don't want from https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign/blob/master/site.yml before you run the top level playbook.

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

#33

Post by djsumdog »

I wrote something similar that's custom for my personal infrastructure:

https://github.com/sumdog/bee2

There are some blog posts in the README that go into how I built a lot of it. A lot of it is specialized for me though. I have a ton of rspec/tests but I don't have a real config schema or entirely useful error messages. I might add some in the future.

Looking at the list in this, I'd advice against nextCloud(ownCloud). I recently setup their official Docker containers and the web piece works alright, but their F-droid app continually crashes and I had to uninstall it and the nextcloud-client in Gentoo's package manager segfaults at home and refused to build at work.

I've read other stories of data loss with nextcloud. It might be better now but my initial experiences made me use syncthing. Syncthing does use relays if you're behind a NAT, but if you have openvpn setup, you can also force it to use a direct IP address as well.

If you're thinking if self hosting and have the time, I'd suggest building it yourself; borrowing (and properly accrediting/licensing) other open source projects, their ansible scripts and containers and such. You learn a whole lot about why this tooling is so complex.

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

#34

Post by OJFord »

thinkmassive wrote: post #9
OJFord wrote: post #3

Isn't this just duplicating effort that's probably already been done, in many cases by the first-party maintainers, in Dockerfiles? I don't mean to start 'Docker vs. Ansible', I just wonder why if you wanted a quick way to setup a single-server 'own private cloud' you wouldn't just go with what already exists, and list the images you want in a docker-compose.yaml file? (Which would additionally set you up for 'scalin…

Not everyone wants Docker installed on their servers. It’s not a requirement with this playbook. Furthermore, if you do want to use containers, there are tools like ansible-bender[1] that use Ansible to build container images. [1] https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-bender (edited the link to point to the ansible-community repo)

But I'd have thought if you care that Docker isn't installed on your servers, you're probably not running this anyway?

It seems to me that the target demographic is people that just want the least effort minimal faff way of getting some services up and running for personal non-production use. And for that it was my suggestion that many of the services probably already provide a Dockerfile upstream, so the easiest thing to do would be to install docker-compose, list the images, and `up`.

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

#36

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

lxcfan wrote: post #27
jlkuester7 wrote: post #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…

The two are not incompatible. You can deploy containers with Ansible.

Indeed:) Ansible will happily interface with pretty much anything; consider that it officially supports Swarm (https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/docker_swarm...), k8s (https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/k8s_module.h...), and puppet (https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/puppet_modul...) for example:) It makes excellent glue if used with other things, or a good tool all on its own. Which is especially nice because it lets you try new things without changing your overall setup too much; you can deploy all your services with RPMs, and then move one thing into docker, and still use ansible for everything:)

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

#37

Post by slovette »

Is there a benefit to doing this over something like Cloudron(1)?

I see this being for people that just want things to work without much of the effort to make it so. If that’s the case, a simple web UI that treats all the little solutions as “apps” in a way makes sense. Not plugging here, just curious to the practical everyday differences.

1. https://cloudron.io

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

#38

Post by ocdtrekkie »

slovette wrote: post #37

Is there a benefit to doing this over something like Cloudron(1)? I see this being for people that just want things to work without much of the effort to make it so. If that’s the case, a simple web UI that treats all the little solutions as “apps” in a way makes sense. Not plugging here, just curious to the practical everyday differences. 1. https://cloudron.io

Cloudron.io seems pretty nice, speaking as someone who uses/works on a different platform (Sandstorm.io). Cloudron is going to cost you money if you want the benefits of automatic updates and the like, which is a downside for some (I think paying for good products/services is worthwhile), but I absolutely think making management of a ton of apps simple like a phone is the key to self-hosted online services. One of the biggest features of a good self-hosting platform should be unified authentication and identity, so you aren't managing your account on a dozen different apps.

I've always been impressed by Cloudron's well-maintained app library and constant march of major feature improvements to the platform.

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

#39

Post by thinkmassive »

OJFord wrote: post #34
thinkmassive wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone wants Docker installed on their servers. It’s not a requirement with this playbook. Furthermore, if you do want to use containers, there are tools like ansible-bender[1] that use Ansible to build container images. [1] https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-bender (edited the link to point to the ansible-community repo)

But I'd have thought if you care that Docker isn't installed on your servers, you're probably not running this anyway? It seems to me that the target demographic is people that just want the least effort minimal faff way of getting some services up and running for personal non-production use. And for that it was my suggestion that many of the services probably already provide a Dockerfile upstream, so the easiest thi…

This project has nothing to do with Docker, and there are many reasons why someone would want to avoid running Docker on a server (a separate issue from using containers). I'm confused about why you think Docker is relevant to this set of Ansible playbooks, and also why this would only be suitable for "personal non-production use."

The only requirement for a remote host to be managed by Ansible is python, and even that can be installed by Ansible itself using the `raw` module on an initial run with nothing but ssh access.

No need to gather a bunch of random Dockerfiles from various places, tweak them to be compatible, and create a docker-compose file from scratch... how is that "the easiest thing" when this is a complete set of Ansible playbooks where the work is already done?

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

#40

Post by ggregoire »

jlkuester7 wrote: post #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…

> Not trying to start a Docker vs. Ansible flame war

Don't worry, they serve very different purposes. You already probably know but Docker is for running applications in isolation, while Ansible is for provisioning and configuring hosts. For instance, you won't use Docker to harden sshd on your hosts but Ansible.

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