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Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

cloudinabottle.org

191–200 of 336 posts

Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

#191
In the age of LLM agents, still going for Docker/Podmam on anything besides local development box seems like a weird choice.

Docker has poor tooling for network level security between the containers, has issues with different runtimes per container, etc.

It is just a bit primitive if you want to expose multiple services to the internet on the same server. One of those apps will get compromised and then all the others will follow.

If you want a decent self hosted server, ask your frontier LLM agent of choice to configure kubernetes (on something like k3s) with mandatory userns mapping so nothing runs as root on the host, default deny firewall so inter-container communication is as locked down as possible, and if your router supports, set up VLANs so none of the containers can access your other devices on the LAN. Use something like backrest to handle backups, alertmanager and Grafana for monitoring, Keel for auto updates. Also consider separating ingress for public and internal services and use Tailscale with split DNS to acces the internal entrypoint. Set up Crowdsec as WAF and subscribe to their free blocklists to filter out bots. Ask it to set this all up using Ansible, so it can be maintained.

While this would be extremely time consuming to set up and maintain by hand, an agent can do and test it in a few hours.

Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

#192
post #191

In the age of LLM agents, still going for Docker/Podmam on anything besides local development box seems like a weird choice. Docker has poor tooling for network level security between the containers, has issues with different runtimes per container, etc. It is just a bit primitive if you want to expose multiple services to the internet on the same server. One of those apps will get compromised and then all the others…

Skip kubernetes and deploy to bare server

Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

#194
It's sad that open source / open-internet projects always have a clunky design. Here, the main screenshot, at the top, uses a monospaced System font. You might as well display a terminal and it's a wrap. To appeal to broader audiences:

- You both need to trigger the potential OSS contributors, with references to Debian, Ubuntu maybe, and appeal to big donors, which is another topic entirely,

- And ALSO have a design that triggers the broader audiences and therefore, very "turnkey", very packaged, very "Comment like and subscribe", one-click install on your NAS, etc. Privacy is then a characteristic but services are the real features.

Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

#195
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does being docker compose based make it inaccessible? Self hosting implies having hardware and software knowledge to set it up. I agree, having a meta package that would set the system up as systemd would be an even lower barrier. But then again, there are podman commands that do this for you today anyway. Self hosting could also imply buying a device that just does this with an additional management interface fo…

> How does being docker compose based make it inaccessible? Because it requires people to also have knowledge about the ins and outs of docker and docker compose. If we are talking about web applications it is yet another layer that has been added over the years. It used to be that you could fairly easily host most things on a old fashioned lamp host (I am talking decades ago) and all you had to know was basic file t…

> you could fairly easily host most things on a old fashioned lamp host (I am talking decades ago) and all you had to know was basic file transferring

Setting up and maintaining a server is easier today than it was decades ago, A LAMP at this time meant a lot of manual setup, IaC wasn't a thing, reproducibility wasn't a goal, versioning was confidential, documentation was scarce and often outdated, out of the box security was lower, ties to the OS were higher. Managing virtual hosts was clunky, updating OS/PHP was risky. I would not go back for anything.

> having to setup docker properly (rootless and all that)

Rootless being the proper way to setup Docker is a highly controversial take. You will mostly get added complexity and a false sentiment of security from it.

Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

#196
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The user was called adl-collab, when it forked repos to add implementations it made them under a branch called "andrew". The biggest contributor to the project in the last 3mo is andrewlaack... and we can also just take a guess that "adl" in adl-collab is AnDrewLaak.

Possibly andrewlaack’s clanker run amok

At least this is more informative than "Thanks Andrew".

Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

#197
post #191

In the age of LLM agents, still going for Docker/Podmam on anything besides local development box seems like a weird choice. Docker has poor tooling for network level security between the containers, has issues with different runtimes per container, etc. It is just a bit primitive if you want to expose multiple services to the internet on the same server. One of those apps will get compromised and then all the others…

> has issues with different runtimes per container

Could you be more specific about that?

> One of those apps will get compromised and then all the others will follow...

Per their security docs, containers are rootless but I don't see anything about VLAN isolation.

https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/how_it_works/security.html

Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

#198
post #191

In the age of LLM agents, still going for Docker/Podmam on anything besides local development box seems like a weird choice. Docker has poor tooling for network level security between the containers, has issues with different runtimes per container, etc. It is just a bit primitive if you want to expose multiple services to the internet on the same server. One of those apps will get compromised and then all the others…

[deleted]

Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

#200
If your "opt-in platform features" and "interface to allow permissioned access to data and capabilities between different apps" is more expressive/discoverable than eg Cloud Foundry's "Service Broker" approach[0], then I am pretty excited! I run a lot of disparate services which don't interoperate except through explicit workflow automation pipelines (I use ConcourseCI to eg upload images to Immich [1] albums, but others might use n8n[2] for the same purpose).

The "workflow automation" approach is a lot of resource overhead and broker-config maintainance, but my kingdom to be able to arbitrarily compose apps' states, eg commutimemap.com + Craigslist.

0. https://www.cloudfoundry.org/technology/open-service-broker-...

1. https://github.com/gavmor/immich-concourse-resource

2. n8n.io

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