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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

#11

Post by staunch »

rdrey wrote: post #8
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.

Portal will have a method for sharing data between apps, but it's not there yet. For authentication, apps can run an HTTP server on a special port, which will be proxied to the user pre-authenticated. That might change before launch, but it's fairly simple.

In the case of apps that publish public URLs (like WordPress) they can choose to use Portal's single sign on or not.

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

#12

Post by staunch »

nharada wrote: post #10

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 powe…

1. We're using all of our own hardware, co-located in good datacenters with high quality internet providers. I've been building and deploying servers around the world for over a decade, so I have some strong opinions on this. We may also use rented dedicated servers in similar facilities during the public beta, but that's temporary. Uptimes will be comparable.

2. You can forward different external ports to the same internal ports on apps (e.g. port 31245 -> port 22 on your Ubuntu app). You can also launch VPN server and then ssh to your servers from inside your virtual LAN :-)

Web traffic is handled by the Portal system, so port 80 and 443 are "intercepted" by default. They proxy HTTP traffic to your apps based on the paths that you specify. You can forward /blog to one WordPress instance and /otherblog to another WordPress instance.

3. The compute power levels are meant to be relative to standard usage, but benchmarks are probably better for hackers, so we'll do that.

4. Thank you!

Great feedback, thank you!

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

#13

Post by sida »

Sandstorm and portals are awesome. If you add integration with something like OpenStack and deploy the system behind corporate firewalls. I bet it would reduce the hurdles to enterprise sales. (If corporate teams can just one click install new services because they are are hosted internally)

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

#14

Post by staunch »

sida wrote: post #13

Sandstorm and portals are awesome. If you add integration with something like OpenStack and deploy the system behind corporate firewalls. I bet it would reduce the hurdles to enterprise sales. (If corporate teams can just one click install new services because they are are hosted internally)

Thank you! Portal already supports booting VMs by emulating OpenStack's metadata service, that's how we're supporting CloudInit with Ubuntu and CentOS.

Businesses are an easy sell, but we want regular people on the internet to run their own stuff too :-)

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

#15

Post by jaequery »

staunch wrote: post #5
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.

What's the CPU to be exact? If it's something like an sandy/ivy-bridge I was thinking of giving you guys a try. We are not too happy with EC2's specs and looking for something faster.

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

#16

Post by staunch »

jaequery wrote: post #15
staunch wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the CPU to be exact? If it's something like an sandy/ivy-bridge I was thinking of giving you guys a try. We are not too happy with EC2's specs and looking for something faster.

Yes and it should be faster, but I don't want to promise anything until we see what real world usage and performance is like during the beta. Thanks for the feedback, again.

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

#19

Post by amirmc »

This looks great and I'm always please to see products that make it easier for people run their own infrastructure without having to become sysadmins [1]. I especially like the demo video that describes how apps can be added.

However, one of the things I care about is the ability to self-host if I want to (even though I'm personally unlikely to). I can do this with Sandstorm but doesn't look like I can with Portal. Are there plans to make this possible?

[1] I work on a project with similar aims but takes a clean-slate approach, based on unikernels - http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/

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

#20

Post by dETAIL »

staunch wrote: post #3
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!

Signed up!
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