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Show HN: Portal - Run apps on your own easy to use cloud server

portalplatform.net

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Re: Show HN: Portal - Run apps on your own easy to use cloud server

#3

Post by staunch »

dETAIL wrote: post #2

First of all I think this is awesome! But my question is, the system looks ready...If I pay now, why do I have to wait till April?

There's a bit more to do before it's ready. Your card won't be charged until you start the beta, so signing up just reserves your spot as a founding user. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Portal - Run apps on your own easy to use cloud server

#5

Post by staunch »

jaequery wrote: post #4

Looks cool but anyone know what the hardware specs (CPU/RAID/SSD model/etc...) are?

Thanks! Performance should be on par with high quality VPS providers like EC2 using SSD instances. We're using all modern Intel CPUs and Samsung SSDs with Linux software RAID, currently.

Re: Show HN: Portal - Run apps on your own easy to use cloud server

#8

Post by rdrey »

fiatjaf wrote: post #7

What's the difference between this and Sandstorm?

This runs VMs, Sandstorm runs OS containers. Apps for Sandstorm might need a little work to integrate with Sandstorm's model for users and permissions, but apps in Portal won't have a built-in mechanism for sharing documents/data and will each have individual authentication, I assume.

Re: Show HN: Portal - Run apps on your own easy to use cloud server

#9

Post by staunch »

fiatjaf wrote: post #7

What's the difference between this and Sandstorm?

It's an alternative to Sandstorm. We've made some different choices, like using full KVM VMs instead of Linux containers for apps. Portal also doesn't require that apps know much about Portal itself to be run as apps. They can use their own authentication or the single sign on system.

An unmodified Ubuntu cloud image is a valid (though basic) Portal app and can boot using CloudInit. Real world apps store data on the separate "user data" drive that is attached to all app VMs, which makes them upgradeable. And they almost always have a web interface for the user to interact with.

They can also use the Portal metadata service to interact with the system. But for the most part apps just receive raw TCP/IP traffic or proxied HTTP traffic and work normally.

We began working on Portal before Sandstorm was public, but I can tell you this is the first time I've been happy to see other people working on the same idea as myself. Decentralizing the internet is more of a mission than a competition.

Also, we expect to be able to run Sandstorm as a Portal app, so you could run many Sandstorm apps inside one VM, assuming they're okay with that.

Re: Show HN: Portal - Run apps on your own easy to use cloud server

#10

Post by nharada »

Very cool! A few questions:

1. Is the hardware infrastructure in house or built on another cloud provider? I ask because you offer several server locations. Am I afforded the same up-times I'd find with AWS or Azure?

2. How do you deal with having multiple apps on the same port? Could Wordpress and another web server exist at the same time? Can I SSH to multiple machines?

3. Do you have stronger specs on compute power? "Standard" doesn't really mean much to me.

4. Great domain name.

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