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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

#31

Post by sudent »

staunch wrote: post #12
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 i…

For (2) can we add different domains to be used? It seems to be like it (from the screenshot, there's a select box for the domains) though I'm not sure. Thanks

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

#32

Post by staunch »

eberfreitas wrote: post #30

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 filte…

It should be possible to run an entirely open source set of apps on Portal or Sandstorm and move between services freely.

With Portal, we're experimenting with things like Camlistore[1] running as apps that advertise their storage capabilities generically to other apps through a simple API. We won't have that for the first version, but it is coming. The complexity is mostly on developers modifying their apps, which is why we're avoiding initially.

1. http://camlistore.org/

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

#33

Post by staunch »

sudent wrote: post #31
staunch wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

For (2) can we add different domains to be used? It seems to be like it (from the screenshot, there's a select box for the domains) though I'm not sure. Thanks

Yes, you can have multiple domains per account and map paths on them to different apps. Thanks for the questions!

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

#35

Post by itistoday2 »

Your website says:

> Portal is designed to help create a world in which users are not locked in by proprietary technology. Portal users should be able to switch to alternative hosting companies and back again, with little effort.

Could you elaborate on that a bit? Because from the website I get the sense that your Portal software itself is proprietary, not open source, but I could be mistaken.

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

#36

Post by staunch »

itistoday2 wrote: post #35

Your website says: > Portal is designed to help create a world in which users are not locked in by proprietary technology. Portal users should be able to switch to alternative hosting companies and back again, with little effort. Could you elaborate on that a bit? Because from the website I get the sense that your Portal software itself is proprietary, not open source, but I could be mistaken.

We may end up releasing standalone version of Portal as open source that lets technical users run everything themselves. But that doesn't help regular people and it doesn't solve the problem of renting a server from a trustworthy host.

The biggest issue is lock in, not proprietary vs open source. It's okay that Facebook is proprietary, but we don't think it's right that you can't switch from Facebook to a new social network, without losing most of your data. They create intentionally broken data exporting systems to keep people locked in. They can only do this because they hold all of the data we've given them.

With Portal users control all of the data themselves, so they can give it to any new app they want to use. And they can even export their entire Portal environment and take it to another provider entirely.

Thanks for the feedback!

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

#37

Post by fit2rule »

eberfreitas wrote: post #30

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 filte…

Maybe you'd be interested in the sovereign project?

https://github.com/al3x/sovereign.git

Sovereign is a set of Ansible playbooks that you can use to build and maintain your own personal cloud (I know I know). It’s based entirely on open source software, so you’re in control.

It seems to be a pretty active and prosperous project at the moment .. I'm part-way through getting my own rPi-based cloud infrastructure set up, and I'm finding it quite enlightening to be using Sovereign as the base.

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

#38

Post by amirmc »

eberfreitas wrote: post #30

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 filte…

It's possible but I don't know of anything open source that exists yet. The stack I'm working on deals with the underlying issues you describe, including storage and identity/connectivity (which is the basis of the social network aspect you mention) [1]. I commented a few days ago on how such a system might work for the example of photos [2].

[1] http://nymote.org/ (which uses MirageOS unikernels http://mirage.io)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9026778

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