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Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

virtkick.io

71–80 of 96 posts

Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#71
post #62
post #59

Without any judgement over the project and its quality, I would not call it "Self-hosted DO". Because DigitalOcean, basically, is a way to get VMs without self-hosting them!

(co-founder here) Of course your perspective on DigigalOcean is valid but we think of it simply as a good philosophy to deliver a VM to a user in a seamless, straightforward way - that's the part that we want achieve and let users to self-host. Essentially, you could build your own DigitalOcean using VirtKick. Does it make sense for you? Doesn't mean you should rush and start your own business .. you can run it priva…

Got downvoted for this...

I honestly value DO for the service of providing VMs, and I don't care to run my private VMs. We also have dedicated servers, which run docker directly.

Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#72

This is an awesome project! Thanks for choosing the AGPLv3! I tried to create a VM on the demo site, and got a nice Ruby error message next to the VM's name on the 'Machines' page: undefined method `+' for nil:NilClass Still, I'm very excited about this! If anyone from the project reads this: Where is the appropriate place to request support for an additional GNU/Linux distribution? I would love to get GNU Guix runni…

> I want my contributions to the free software community to remain free. And you don't feel that the AGPLv3 ensures that...? Or you mean "I don't want my contributions to be distributed under any other license"?

If you are assigning them copyright, and they can sell proprietary licensed versions, then it's a pretty valid request...

Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#73
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Docker moved out of lxc long time ago

Docker by default uses their own libcontainer now but you can change that. In fact last time I checked it supported quite a few via execution drivers like OpenVZ, systemd-nspawn, libvirt-lxc, libvirt-sandbox, qemu/kvm, BSD Jails, Solaris Zones, chroot

actually it only does two, lxc and libcontainer (aka native) https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/master/daemon/execdriv...

Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#74
post #56
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your comment. UI comes first as every user will hit it. API comes next. We planned DigitalOcean-compatible API altogether with a CLI. Looks like we removed this from our website by mistake (will get it back real quick), but it's listed in our IGG campaign: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/virtkick-take-cloud-back

That sounds like a good approach; reimplementing an existing API like EC2 or DO makes it easier to integrate your software with tools like Vagrant and Terraform.

Exactly right, we value existing tools - that's what makes DO so strong. :)

Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want my contributions to the free software community to remain free. And you don't feel that the AGPLv3 ensures that...? Or you mean "I don't want my contributions to be distributed under any other license"?

If you have a contributor assignment, the assignee can choose to release the changes under a proprietary license.

It's not our intention though, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8527999

Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#77
post #70
post #55

So what exactly is the advantage of using this layer over the existing libvirt ecosystem? If this is supposed to manage your VMs for you instead of you using the existing libvirt tools, I can see a number of disadvantages. * No virt-manager with SPICE, networking configuration, and other features * No virt-install for very easy creation of VMs, even straight from distro repository URLs * No virsh for command-line man…

What one regards as a feature, other regard as misfeatures. If you like virt-manager, then VirtKick isn't really for you. We value a simple UI more than virt-manager, and REST API more than virsh. We don't say your way is wrong. It's just more difficult. Existing libvirt clients, at least those that we know of, aren't super reliable though. libvirt stucks when there's too much happening on the HV, or denies jobs with…

> so even now we're not "just" a frontend for libvirt.

I would certainly prefer that virtkick was 'just a frontend' for libvirt. Then the people who are making use of virtkick can seamlessly rely on the huge amount of existing software that supports libvirt. You can provide a REST API that is translated to the existing libvirt API rather than replacing it.

If you have task-scheduling improvements for libvirt, they should be upstreamed rather than only exist in your software, so everyone can benefit from them.

Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#78
post #53

I actually wanted to create something like this. Does it do ssh key injection when VMS are created?

Not at this point (we mount an ISO as CD), but we've got it planned: https://github.com/virtkick/virtkick/issues/6

Perfect! I wanted to host my own DO type thing for personal projects and I tried "webvirtmgr" which has a nice control panel for libvirt, but the creator insists that ssh key injection is out of the scope of his project. I'm glad to see this happening!

Re: Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

#79

This is an awesome project! Thanks for choosing the AGPLv3! I tried to create a VM on the demo site, and got a nice Ruby error message next to the VM's name on the 'Machines' page: undefined method `+' for nil:NilClass Still, I'm very excited about this! If anyone from the project reads this: Where is the appropriate place to request support for an additional GNU/Linux distribution? I would love to get GNU Guix runni…

Frankly, there are two mutually exclusive camps: free software and open source. I myself sympathize with free software (GPL) whereas RushPL with open source (MIT). Selling proprietary versions has never been the reason for CLA, though! We want to be able to re-release VirtKick under MIT (and automatically get rid of CLA) if we get funded, so businesses have no problems with it. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8527999)
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