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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

#21

Post by staunch »

amirmc wrote: post #19

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. A…

We want people to use Portal because it's the best way to run their stuff, not because of any kind of lock in. Making it easy to move away from Portal will be a core feature. If there aren't good alternatives, we may make it possible to download and run the Portal system on your own machine. Making it easy to export data might be easy enough.

Ultimately though, there's no way to have a server in the cloud without relying on someone, so we're trying to build the ideal service for people who want privacy, performance, security, and freedom.

We hope other people will build similar services, so users have choice, and we will cooperate with anyone who has an open platform.

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

#23

Post by staunch »

benwerd wrote: post #22

This is awesome: exactly the kind of simplicity the personal server market needs. I dropped you an email; really interested in making Known work with the platform.

Awesome, thank you. I'll reply to your email, but the answer is definitely yes!

I've created a number of SaaS services over the years and the pain of building a scaleable service shouldn't have to be repeated by every single app developer. It's a huge distraction from building a great app.

It shouldn't take much work to get Known running as a one-click auto-upgrading app, but I look forward to your feedback on the process. Thanks!

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

#24

Post by rdrey »

staunch wrote: post #11
rdrey wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cool, thanks for the clarification. Glad you're building a single sign on feature!

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

#25

Post by rdrey »

staunch wrote: post #9
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…

What I like about the VM-centric design you've adopted is that 'apps' are long-running by default. Sandstorm in its current form is not great for hosting internet-facing sites.

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

#26

Post by general_failure »

rdrey wrote: post #25
staunch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What I like about the VM-centric design you've adopted is that 'apps' are long-running by default. Sandstorm in its current form is not great for hosting internet-facing sites.

What is that?

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

#27

Post by kentonv »

staunch wrote: post #9
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…

> 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.

I'm definitely OK with that. :)

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

#28

Post by kentonv »

rdrey wrote: post #25
staunch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What I like about the VM-centric design you've adopted is that 'apps' are long-running by default. Sandstorm in its current form is not great for hosting internet-facing sites.

Sandstorm tries to encourage web publishing apps to work in a way that significantly reduces resource usage and improves security. The platform will let an app publish a static web site which does not require starting up the app to serve. The platform also lets an app expose an API which starts up the app on-demand. So the app can publish a bunch of static content which includes Javascript that invokes the API when needed (e.g. when a comment is posted), which then wakes up the app to update the static content.

But, yeah, for a fully-dynamic web site served to a large number of users, Sandstorm currently isn't well-suited. It'll get there eventually, but given that other platforms (like Portal) already cover this use case pretty well, we wanted to focus on the interesting things we can do with fine-grained containers.

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

#29

Post by staunch »

kentonv wrote: post #27
staunch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I'm definitely OK with that. :)

Awesome to hear that. You guys seem to have the same motivations, so I'm sure we can make everything play nicely together.

I love your LAN house, btw. We're also insanely hardcore PC gamers who think LAN parties are the most fun thing in the world :-)

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

#30

Post by eberfreitas »

I would love to see an open source architecture with a common underling storage and social capabilities on which we could build apps and interface with others in some kind of decentralized network.

Maybe something like app.net but without a central server with multiple apps. I could install it on my server, dump my photos in there, share with other people, be able to manipulate those images with another app for filters or something. Does that makes any sense? Is there anything like it already?

Sandstorm and portal are cool projects but every app that you install uses it's own infrastructure, it's own database, it's own architecture, and that makes interoperability hard.

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