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

cloudinabottle.org

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

#261
post #239
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at my younger sister, I'd risk saying it's the same in all generations. I'll even say more: I think earlier generations had a general thought of "computer consists of separate parts; you can buy them separately and replace if needed / want better performance", even the less technical ones. But now everything is a black box (therefore e.g. why not overspend and always buy a black box from Apple if that's fashi…

If it is fashionable for 20-30 years running across multiple categories, maybe it's actually valuable and worthwhile.

Yeah it's not my point to say Apple is bad – their laptops are now without competition on build quality, battery life and performance; and iPhone is really solid, and was probably the only good UX back in the day. But it's also pricey (and building antipatterns for repairability and interconnections other vendors happily copied later), and back in the dat it was just natural to be "savvy" – and that meant understanding how much juice you'll get with configuring something with that RAM, HDD vs SDD and whatnot, or that getting phone with SD slot gives you more space for your photos, and it didn't matter it's slower than whatever flash phone manufacturers are using.

Apple popularised the idea of "just buying a computer", which took away some understanding in the common public. It happened somewhere during my generation, and it's just ubiquitous in the following one.

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

#262
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(author here) I'm checking with my team to confirm these came from us, but if so I apologize for this - posts like these should come from a real account with proper disclosure, but also these sorts of requests feel premature for a project like ours that doesn't yet have a sizeable user base.

Please don't require app cooperation for getting apps into a bottle. I don't want to have to fight to get a file in, nor maintain my own fork.

I feel like with the capabilities of AI, I feel like they should be able to just figure this out..

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

#263
post #256

The cloud space is absurd, we've sat by for 2 decades while the likes of AWS define every aspect of deployment, auth, even containerisation. Containerisation was supposed to mean host anywhere, literally redeploy a complex set of services and their connections on any cloud provider at the drop of a hat. That is what a f**ing shipping container is, you rock up to any port in the world and the same container is lifted…

This is just an incoherent bluster. Calm down. You can still ftp some PHP files and it will just work - there are plenty of services that offer that. You don't need to shit your files across buckets and provision 20 IAM profiles - noone's forcing you to do that and that is not how you host a web app. If you're fond of the ftp-based hosting days, those services are available and they will happily take your money.

It's not that it has disappeared it's that vendor-specific cloud has become too normal.

And for the record obviously I'm not advocating for going back to the dark ages, ftp / php / shared hosting also had massive issues, my point was that things were _designed_ to be simple and the model in your head was simple and close to the metal.

If you're joining an existing project today, or like OP's problem/solution you just want to self-host something, maybe even just to evaluate it, it has become a headache.

I've never actually seen a "real" containerised app, one that was 100% agnostic and simple to deploy without multiple exceptions for 3rd party services and so on.

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

#264
post #242

This is a great idea and I wish it success. Self-hosting shouldn't be a nightmare of researching and setting up 20 different applications. Is there something similar in progress for a "tech company tech stack"? As in, rather than trying to assemble your own custom infrastructure by finding an RPC system, permissions/group manager, credential management, storage, database, service discovery, job management, monitoring…

Ruby ln Rails and are you sure you need all that? Do you have dozens of interrelated products with a billion users for each?

Huh? Which of the things on that list are only needed at the billions of users scale? I'll give you "service discovery" and "dozens of services", sure, but everything else in there seems like a pretty standard need for a SaaS app that feeds a company of more than 10 people?

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

#265

a similar project which i think is a lot better than this (in fact it's so good i'm jealous of its genius) is https://exe.dev . It feels like something that hasn't really hit the mainstream yet but I suspect everyone will be talking about soon.

Closed source, solves a different problem, and just looks like generic agent sandboxes/VMs? What am I missing.

You haven't looked closely enough

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

#266
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(author here) I'm checking with my team to confirm these came from us, but if so I apologize for this - posts like these should come from a real account with proper disclosure, but also these sorts of requests feel premature for a project like ours that doesn't yet have a sizeable user base.

You are also characterizing another project that was open-sourced (sandstorm) and is under active development as "long abandoned". Open source is difficult and requires a fair amount of cheerleading to engage users and make them part of the community. As a result it's hard to see your project in a positive light.

I mean, to be honest it does look like sandstorm development has almost stopped for the past couple of years...or am I missing something? https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/graphs/code-freque...

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

#267
This isn't the hard part of self-hosting, at least not anymore. In the comments here there are lots of examples of similar projects that solve basically the same problem (app selection and deployment). To make self-hosting "easy" we need to solve domain registration, DNS management, and port-forwarding configuration.

This probably requires a project more like OpenWRT that includes an API-driven relationship with a registrar. The lack of a standard (consumer accessible) domain registration API is a huge hole in automating this. If such a project gets some traction, then it could migrate to a physical router that prospective self-hosters could buy. With domain registration, DNS management, and port forwarding all in the router's software, then the remaining hard parts can be sufficiently automated to make self hosting accessible to the average gaming console owner.

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

#268
Sandstorm had a radically more innovative model of hosting: instead of helping you host apps, each document was its own instance. This was really interesting, but as this article notes, did need deep integration with the apps.

I'd be interested to see if your more pragmatic approach plays out. Being able to start by taking apps "off the shelf" largely unmodified, then gradually adding integration via standard proxy features, seems sensible.

In any case, doing single sign on between apps is just a very sensible and worthwhile place to start.

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

#269

a similar project which i think is a lot better than this (in fact it's so good i'm jealous of its genius) is https://exe.dev . It feels like something that hasn't really hit the mainstream yet but I suspect everyone will be talking about soon.

Closed source, solves a different problem, and just looks like generic agent sandboxes/VMs? What am I missing.

i think you're right to call me out. being open source/self hostable is a big plus of this project. outside of that, exe.dev is a fantastic way to deploy pretty much anything; pay a subscription for total compute and distribute that among VMs however you would like, host your own stuff, as simple/as complex as you want it to be. just infinite versatility and a fantastic user experience imo.

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

#270
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…

> Docker has poor tooling for network level security between the containers Aha so LLMs have better tooling for network level security, cloudboy?

Yes, kubernetes makes it much easier to configure proper firewall through network policies.

Docker has networks but there is no good options to limit it beyond those and it is extremely basic and basically leaves everything open between your proxy and app.

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