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

cloudinabottle.org

281–290 of 342 posts

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

#281

Another similar offering: https://runtipi.io/

I have runtipi on 2 homeservers, and fully recommend it. It is not like Coolify, which feels like a mini cloud provider control plane. Runtipi is like an app store. You can load your own app definitions side-by-side with the centrally provided store. Once you have that set up, it's a quick Claude task to translate almost any selfhosted project into a simple click-to-install app through the UI.

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

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

No, sandstorm was deprecated years ago. I was building a platform that was similar to/inspired by sandstorm, and I closely followed it until its creator deprecated it. They now work for Cloudflare and released the 'WorkOS' project a couple weeks ago through them/for them.

I believe you mean Cloudflare OS: https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Current status explained here:

https://sandstorm.io/news/2024-01-14-move-to-sandstorm-org

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

#285
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.

"Long abandoned" is a fair characterization of Sandstorm.

There is a loyal community of enthusiasts trying to keep it alive, but realistically not a lot of progress has been made. (Though, AI has helped them make more progress lately.)

But the original creator of Sandstorm (me) did indeed abandon it long ago (sorry).

More here: https://sandstorm.io/news/2024-01-14-move-to-sandstorm-org

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

#286

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…

I think vendors will do what vendors will do, and you can choose to buy into that or not. Containers fullfilled their promise. You can today host anything yourself easily, with a single command. The problem comes when developers start building things without this in mind. I see simple site analytics apps in github, where the docker compose file is a web os services and the repo itself is full of init scripts and the…

sorry for the typos, I didn't actually come back to grammar check and I'm cringing now

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

#287

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…

I agree with part of your complaint, and many cloud services are deliberate vendor lock in (e.g. “serverless”).

But all the cloud vendors offer containers as a service, where you build your image locally and run it in a region. Naturally there will be setup to access networking, IO, gpus etc.

so i think you have some fair claims but you’re not making the best case here.

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

#288

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…

If you don't mind me asking a question to better understand your perspective: Are you old enough to have personally experienced and built self-hosted things before the advent of AWS, cloud hosted stuff, or is your text above (which I do not disagree with in any way) the point of view of a person who began working on this stuff in the "cloud-native" era, post-2012 or around then? I'm thinking from the "20 years ago" i…

Every project I've ever worked on - sans two at IBM post Red Hat acquisition - had legacy style Javaboxes at the customer's DC or was still rocking mainframe DB2 stuff. I'm seeing bare-metal Kubernetes / OpenShift gaining a stronger foothold though. Rarely, some specific workloads did run on Azure - never anything critical though.

For context, I do mainly development work for EU enterprises and the public sector.

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind me asking a question to better understand your perspective: Are you old enough to have personally experienced and built self-hosted things before the advent of AWS, cloud hosted stuff, or is your text above (which I do not disagree with in any way) the point of view of a person who began working on this stuff in the "cloud-native" era, post-2012 or around then? I'm thinking from the "20 years ago" i…

Yeah, self-hosting is definitely having a come back. Lots of content creators who would have been evangelizing cloud solutions in the past have been instead going into the various self hosting rabbit holes. There is a bit of a pendulum swing. You now have access to so much information and tooling to host your own things, it’s pretty awesome compared to what we had before 2010. Not sure how much impact that will have…

Unfortunately it getting more expensive, as hosting companies started to rise prices because of memory costing more

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

#290

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…

If you don't mind me asking a question to better understand your perspective: Are you old enough to have personally experienced and built self-hosted things before the advent of AWS, cloud hosted stuff, or is your text above (which I do not disagree with in any way) the point of view of a person who began working on this stuff in the "cloud-native" era, post-2012 or around then? I'm thinking from the "20 years ago" i…

There’s a big gap between hobby self-hosting and enterprise.

Clouds are appealing (note, not technically better but more appealing) in the enterprise for numerous reasons. We already have a contract, I don’t have to spend a month with procurement. Their support is “respected” so “I asked AWS and they told me to pound sand” is an acceptable response to a lot of requests. No one ever got fired for picking AWS. The list goes on.

None of those friction points apply to hobby hosting, really. IAM is annoying because the alternative isn’t “fill out 7 forms and host 12 meetings to get a new vendor in”.

You also get less of the benefits. Low volume SQS can be trivially replaced, but if you use enough that you’re debating making a whole team to manage Kafka then paying the cloud tax can look appealing because of the predictability (your Kafka team might fail, SQS probably handles larger workloads currently).

At some scale, not having to wait 12 months for the message queuing team to support TLS for some regulation becomes worth a cloud tax.

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