I'm just not understanding the point...
Have LLMs just made it too easy to make new projects?
Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
311–320 of 334 posts
Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
#312The 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…
We don't need to fix hosting. There's no such thing as "portable" or "generic" and there never will be. At a certain point you have to use an implementation of and that's going to lock you in.
Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
#313The 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…
I've been doing this pre-2012.
There's always been vendor lock-in. Someone has to implement technologies to the standards, those are most of the time commercial interests.
Apache vs nginx, rhel vs debian, spring vs j2ee, etc. etc.
I think it's good for the young crowd to get into self-hosting. You learn more fundamentals that way, for sure. But I'm not looking to move stuff into self-hosted.
I get unlimited scalability in AWS. I can standup and run an app for $0-$5/month depending on how I want to build it. That app will have unlimited scalability, redundancy, automated backups, etc. It's not worth dealing with the headaches of managing things myself.
Most everything is the way it is today for good reason, it's just that the youngsters haven't had to learn those reasons themselves.
Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
#314The 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 mean, containers are working fine like that. Choose any hoster you want, either specifically supporting docker deployment or bare metal and host your containers. It's just that many tools come with bad images or bad documentation on how to configure things for your domains and needs. That's usually where it breaks down. Not the container tech in itself. That one's working fine mostly.
Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
#315I think the time for this space is here. The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever. Currently, a lot of this space is docker compose based and simply inaccessible to so many who may otherwise be interested. Whether or not it's this project or another, I hope something gathers enough steam soon to truly break the barriers to entry.
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…
> Self hosting implies having hardware and software knowledge to set it up
This is unfortunately true, which is why I think we need a different term for turn-key self hosting. I like indiehosting myself.
Indie hosting = owning a car so you can use it Self hosting = building a kit car
Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
#316Interesting project! I've found self hosting a lot more approachable with the advent of AI to help with inevitable errors. I run every new app in its own service account and as a rootless podman quadlet. There are three main difficulties that I come up against with every app. First is backups, or more accurately restoring data. My understanding is that just taking a snapshot doesn't always give you a working restore…
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Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
#317I'm glad to see this, auth in particular is a real sore spot in self-hosting. In terms of the available integrations, Home Assistant feels like a big missing item - it's the core of many folks home server deployments.
I have been building https://github.com/openrundev/openrun which makes auth (OIDC/SAML) with RBAC easy for self-hosted apps.
Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
#318This 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 re…
Makes me a little sad that it's been almost exactly 6 years since I made this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24475946
In that time I started a domain registrar, a free OpenID Connect login service (https://lastlogin.net/), created the de facto list of tunneling tools (https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling), and built a couple of my own tunneling tools (SirTunnel and boringproxy), all to try and make self hosting easier.
I'm still trying to solve this problem. Some progress has been made (mostly by other projects), but we're still not there.
FWIW, I used to think everyone owning a domain was the way forward. I now suspect otherwise. Domains are too expensive (especially most TLDs outside .com/.net/.org) and the costs of accidentally forgetting to renew are catastrophic. Domains just aren't a consumer product.
I think you only need a domain if you want a permanent public web presence, and I don't think most people need that. Most people just need a better/faster/private google drive, google photos, google docs, etc, and for that it's ok if your domain changes once in a while.
So I think free subdomains set up without vendor lockin are probably the ticket.
If anyone is interested in collaborating in this space, definitely reach out.
Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Precisely. My uncle has been using the builtin Samsung web browser for years on his phone, just because it said "Internet" in the name, and "Chrome" just wasn't a familiar name to him. Most people are like this.
and didn't even matters tbh Samsung web browser uses chromium under the hood
Syphoned off a lot more data to Samsung though, further supporting and enabling their ugly business practices.
Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
#320This 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…
That sounds like Nextcloud