Quit this damn nonsense with Ansible or whatever garbage fashion fad is in vogue these days and finally learn how to make OS packages so you can do configuration management with normal shell scripting inside of them, because that's what it's for. The amount of incompetence and insanity from incompetence has gone too far. Damn it, this is exactly why IT sucks so bad!!!
Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud
81–90 of 145 posts
Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud
#82This 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…
No need for an Ansible vs. Docker argument when you can combine them both!
I run a similar project called Ansible-NAS - https://github.com/davestephens/ansible-nas - which originally came about because I fell out of love with FreeNAS, and felt I could do a better job with Ubuntu, Ansible, and a bunch of Docker images.
Sovereign is awesome, I've been watching it for a while, but I'm not keen on everything being installed directly onto the system which is what I tried to solve with Ansible-NAS.
Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud
#83Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud
#84Quit this damn nonsense with Ansible or whatever garbage fashion fad is in vogue these days and finally learn how to make OS packages so you can do configuration management with normal shell scripting inside of them, because that's what it's for. The amount of incompetence and insanity from incompetence has gone too far. Damn it, this is exactly why IT sucks so bad!!!
Maybe you've never worked with someone that sucked at shell scripting, or packaging.
Ansible is awesome for enabling people to do reasonably complicated things in a consistent manner, at scale, without having to write all of the boilerplate code to be able to do so.
This is forgetting the fact that Ansible is reasonably opinionated, which is great for lowering the barrier to entry and helping devs/admins to be productive quickly.
When I just need to Get Shit Done, Ansible is awesome.
Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think like many other terms like 'cloud', 'private', 'start up' there is a lot of gray area :). It's up to you where you draw the line. For me, self-hosting means running software in a manner where I have control of the data/application code and the server. With that definition, running software on EC2/DO/Linode is self-hosting. When I self-host using these servers, I know what the server is running and where the d…
I think it's also important to highlight that perfect is the enemy of good. I moved from Google services (A) to an open source platform... that I was paying them to host on Google Cloud (B). Sure, it's still at Google, but the ability for Google to mine data from it is significantly reduced. Of course, later, I moved to hosting it in-house (C), where I have direct physical control. It's likely if my choices were A or…
Great point about D. I self-host at home (it's a thinkcenter m600) but it depends on external services. I use DO DNS and Let's Encrypt TLS, backup to S3. Not to mention I rely on comcast for internet and public IP!
Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
This touches on a problem I've been thinking about a lot. AWS, etc, have solved the problem of hardware operation. Containerization is doing the same for OS operation. I think the next thing is app operation. For some things, I'm happy to use SaaS providers, where they are responsible for the whole stack. For others, I'm happy to use apps, where they just provide the code, and I provide the platform. But for a number…
Sandstorm was a really nice solution to this, but it required each app to be integrated with it, which I personally think is what killed it. (Which sucked, because for what it supported it was the best option available)
Please don't past-tense Sandstorm! The community is still working on it. Albeit a little slower. ;)
Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud
#87Quit this damn nonsense with Ansible or whatever garbage fashion fad is in vogue these days and finally learn how to make OS packages so you can do configuration management with normal shell scripting inside of them, because that's what it's for. The amount of incompetence and insanity from incompetence has gone too far. Damn it, this is exactly why IT sucks so bad!!!
Not sure why you are being downvoted. There are way too many people posing as engineers out there inventing all sorts of stupid shit. If you can't deploy the software you write you shouldn't be writing software - period.
Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud
#88This 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…
Sovereign can be used as is to create linux container with LXD without any changes. You can create container image and than use it across your immutable infrastructure.
Don’t waste time in Docker, for this purpose use lxd containers [1]. LXD containers are more secure than docker in general and provide support for unprivileged containers for over 5 years. You can use your ansible scripts to create and manage your container images the way you manage bare metal or a VM. Indeed the modern LXD can help you seamlessly manage VM or Linux container [2], because when you need to directly access underlying host hardware VM is still more secure than container. Also with mount syscall interception in version 3.19 of LXD [3], it is possible to mount NFS inside container in a more secure way with unprivileged container running in user namespace.
Initially docker itself was built using lxc [4], but then decided to re-invent the wheels to build its own libcontainer without any significant advantage over lxc, just NIH. Obviously given all the money which went into docker and than kubernetes using it. Docker is more famous in spite of being inferior because of the marketing money spend on it like Java (a language which is famous because, sun spend over 500 million in early years of its inception on marketing). Kubernetes is famous and a valid tool for google level of problems for 90% of startups LXD is a better fit. This is the same fight like old times when inferior technology wins due to sheer marketing like Blu-ray won but rendered not as useful, same is docker.
[1] https://linuxcontainers.org/
[2] https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/lxd-3-18-has-been-rele...
[3] https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/lxd-3-19-has-been-rele...
[4] https://vyomtech.com/2014/03/04/docker_and_linux_containers_...
Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud
#89This 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.
Yet they are both security disasters.
Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
This touches on a problem I've been thinking about a lot. AWS, etc, have solved the problem of hardware operation. Containerization is doing the same for OS operation. I think the next thing is app operation. For some things, I'm happy to use SaaS providers, where they are responsible for the whole stack. For others, I'm happy to use apps, where they just provide the code, and I provide the platform. But for a number…
Sandstorm was a really nice solution to this, but it required each app to be integrated with it, which I personally think is what killed it. (Which sucked, because for what it supported it was the best option available)
Ah, interesting! Just reading the home page wearing my developer hat makes this stand out: "Each document, chat room, mail box, notebook, blog, or anything else you create is a "grain" in Sandstorm. Sandstorm containerizes each one in its own secure sandbox from which it cannot talk to the world without express permission."
The notion that every document is its own independent unit sounds pretty menacing to me. Could be fine for some things, but getting things running there is sounding like a fair bit of work to me, and very limited.
And then this part is especially bad: "[maybe someday] You won't have to deal with payments | Eventually, we hope to make Sansdtorm implement in-app purchases and deposit the proceeds directly to your bank account"
Right there a lot of incentive to integrate has leaked out. "Please build for our platform in exchange for no money" is not quite the worst offer I've had, but it's definitely not appealing. Looking through the Wayback machine, I see
But the part that really concerns me is that they seem to think that server apps can run like mobile apps. To me one of the most powerful things about SaaS products is that the aggregated use information drives both product and operational improvements and allows rapid response to bugs and issues. So as a developer choosing between this and a SaaS approach, this feels like having one foot in a bucket to me.
For example, I recently outsourced my mail hosting to Fastmail precisely because I want experts to run things. Would I be happier if the data were stored somewhere I control? Definitely. But not if that means the experts aren't paying attention anymore.