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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

#111

Post by dragonsh »

rlpb wrote: post #103
jnwatson wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on. I like LXD, and I used it before docker. Docker is a standard and community. You can find prebuilt containers online and layer your own additions with a single configuration line. Don’t get me wrong, Docker has made some stupid technology decisions, but the network effect of so many adopters means that it should be the default choice for any container situation.

> ...the network effect of so many adopters means that it should be the default choice for any container situation. People assume that just because Docker and lxd do "containers", they are somehow equivalent and it's simply a matter of choosing between the two. But they are far from equivalent. It's not a choice between two competing technologies that achieve the same goal at all.

That’s what I wanted to say docker is only designed with specific goal to have one process running per container. So to run a system like Sovereign will need many many containers, one each for each daemon and then environment variables for each config settings. It’s a nightmare to manage. LXD is designed for multi-process with proper init and do not suffer zombie process problem of docker and unlike Docker supports unprivileged containers.

Personally I will prefer model like Guix System instead of container to run systems and services.I find that solution to be much more elegant than Linux containers or distributions. Linux containers initially came as chroot, jails and zones and than addition of cgroups and namespaces by google made it popular as lxc and later adopted and forked by Docker to make something complicated. These are bolt on solution to have immutable infrastructure. Guix is designed from ground up to be new OS for 21st century server and application infrastructure. May be it will or one of its derivative will become mainstream in time to come.

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

#112

Post by orionhasyou »

tvanantwerp wrote: post #18
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…

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

https://www.linuxserver.io/

not a resource but docker containers you might want to run in your homelab. checkout awesome docker on github or katacoda

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

#113

Post by modoc »

haolez wrote: post #107

As the CTO of an established company, I cannot imagine a situation where I would prefer to maintain my own infrastructure vs using managed cloud services. If I get locked in on a specific product, it's way cheaper to redesign that around an alternative vendor than it is to maintain a private cloud (Ansible, Kubernetes and friends included). As a nerd, I'd prefer to do things myself, but I have business needs to atten…

Cost. Depending on your scale and needs, running stuff on real hardware you manage can be a lot cheaper than AWS/GCP.

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

#114

Post by thelittleone »

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…

Thanks for sharing these list of FLOSS alternatives. Have you had much experience with MailU and anti spam / deliverability issues? My needs are only a few emai's a week, but previous tests with running my own mail server resulted in a high % of emails ending up in client spam folders.

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

#116

Post by hrjd »

jophde wrote: post #95

I currently just let my desktop run constantly. It runs Windows in a KMS for games and sleeping breaks it so I never even suspend. It only seems to use about $10/month in power. I have been considering using DDNS through my router and Cloudflare and trying to create a iOS/Android app that will automatically upload my photos to the my DDNS for storage on my desktop. It feels a little crazy but the idea of syncing my p…

Ngrok as alternative to dynamic DNS?

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

#117

Post by VvR-Ox »

bwbmr wrote: post #49
ggregoire wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Are there any good resources (besides OP) for using Ansible in a home-server environment? Especially in a mixed docker + Ansible environment.

Just start a simple project with Ansible and have a look at the repositories using Ansible to install Docker and deploy containers on your host afterwards.

You may want to put some effort (not that much) into managing your credentials with Ansible Vault[0] and you can try your playbooks e.g. on a Vagrant Machine[1] before applying them to a real host.

Any tutorial will do for the beginning but you should always notice what version of Ansible you are using (vs. the one used in the tutorial) as features change and also there have been some changes to the syntax to improve readability of your playbooks.

[0]: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/vault.htm... [1]: https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/provisioning/ansible.html

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

#118

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #86
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. ;)

I actually didn't realize that. I think I confluated the death of Oasis with Sandstorm in general. I'll have to poke into running it:) Thanks for the correction!

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

#119

Post by ptman »

dragonsh wrote: post #97
davestephens wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 instal…

Docker use Dockerfile (ini) to create container images, so you need to create a soup of Dockerfile, bash scripts combine it with ansible scripts. So it is kind of incompatible, it's better to use LXD containers as I suggested in my previous post for this kind of purpose. Also if you know Docker always maintained one process one docker container so a multi-daemon system with SSH and various mail and groupware servers…

Dockerfile format is not ini. https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/builder/

It also doesn't usually make sense to put SSH in a docker image or container, as you can enter the container using docker exec

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

#120

Post by xref »

haolez wrote: post #107

As the CTO of an established company, I cannot imagine a situation where I would prefer to maintain my own infrastructure vs using managed cloud services. If I get locked in on a specific product, it's way cheaper to redesign that around an alternative vendor than it is to maintain a private cloud (Ansible, Kubernetes and friends included). As a nerd, I'd prefer to do things myself, but I have business needs to atten…

Just depends on workload. Especially if your biz is bandwidth intensive that can be your largest single line item on the major clouds. Then you gotta pay engineers to find ways to reduce your bandwidth costs and the snake eats its own tail
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