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Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

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Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

#51

Post by wpietri »

jlgaddis wrote: post #46
gramakri wrote: post #28

For those in the market to run a private cloud, please try https://cloudron.io . Our motivation is to make it simple to selfhost apps . The main advantage is that we take care of automatic updates across all the apps we package. Happy to answer any questions. Disclaimer: I am the co-founder

Is it really self-hosting if you're running it on someone's cloud?

Definitely.

I mean, you could play an infinite regress game. Do you own the hardware? Do you own the cage the hardware is in? Do you own the building that the cage is in, and the land that the building is on? And then we can go toward owning the power company and the connections to anybody your servers talk to.

But in practice, self-hosting is about control. If what you're running it on is a commodity cloud instance that you could get from a half-dozen providers, then any one cloud provider has very little leverage over you.

Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

#52

Post by ocdtrekkie »

rlander wrote: post #42
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudron.io seems pretty nice, speaking as someone who uses/works on a different platform (Sandstorm.io). Cloudron is going to cost you money if you want the benefits of automatic updates and the like, which is a downside for some (I think paying for good products/services is worthwhile), but I absolutely think making management of a ton of apps simple like a phone is the key to self-hosted online services. One of th…

Just wanted to mention that Sandstorm is awesome. For some reason, despite being around for years, I only found out about it recently. I really think that it should be way more popular than it currently is. Lots of apps are outdated, so I’m planning on investing some personal time to contribute to it.

By all means, hit us up on the mailing list or in IRC if you have any questions or need any help!

Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

#53

Post by Tepix »

dguido wrote: post #19

There are so many servers and apps being installed by Sovereign that I'm certain few would be able to keep it secure ( https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign/wiki/Software-used-by... ). The big win for the cloud is that you're paying a fraction of the cost for access to a, typically, enormous security and operations team. If you want to build software like this that allows people to self-host, you need to scale down…

You're not expected to use and install all of the services offered by Sovereign, just as you're not expected to install all packages of your Linus distribution. I guess we need to make this more explicit in the documentation. Just pick services you plan to use during the installation phase as outlined in the instructions.

Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

#54

Post by asokoloski »

mindslight wrote: post #45

On the general topic of Ansible and personal infrastructure: Every time I attempt to use Ansible (or its kin) to manage my own network, it feels overly obtuse and ultimately unhelpful. Its gains seem to be rooted in configuring a large number of identical servers, and isn't geared for a handful of hosts with some commonalities and some differences. Writing playbooks feels like a still-imperative wrapper around shell…

I had a similar reaction, after trying out Ansible at my last job. We ended up switching to fabric, which is all in Python. It was mostly good but had some awkward warts, which it seems that they've mostly addressed in fabric2. Anyway, it might be worth a look, based on my understanding of your use case.

Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

#55

Post by omnimus »

wpietri wrote: post #48
dguido wrote: post #19

There are so many servers and apps being installed by Sovereign that I'm certain few would be able to keep it secure ( https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign/wiki/Software-used-by... ). The big win for the cloud is that you're paying a fraction of the cost for access to a, typically, enormous security and operations team. If you want to build software like this that allows people to self-host, you need to scale down…

This touches on a problem I've been thinking about a lot. AWS, etc, have solved the problem of hardware operation. Containerization is doing the same for OS operation. I think the next thing is app operation. For some things, I'm happy to use SaaS providers, where they are responsible for the whole stack. For others, I'm happy to use apps, where they just provide the code, and I provide the platform. But for a number…

Maybe something like this https://remotestorage.io/ becomes popular. I would love to make apps that use user owned universal storage/server.

Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

#56

Post by Tepix »

choward wrote: post #8
navaati wrote: post #2

For my fellow HNers, this is "private cloud" in the meaning of Owncloud, not of Openstack.

I hear about Nextcloud a lot more than I hear about Owncloud. Does anyone know why this project uses Owncloud instead of Nextcloud?

I think there's an open issue for the switch. Just need a good pull request by a volunteer...

Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

#57

Post by Tepix »

wpietri wrote: post #51
jlgaddis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really self-hosting if you're running it on someone's cloud?

Definitely. I mean, you could play an infinite regress game. Do you own the hardware? Do you own the cage the hardware is in? Do you own the building that the cage is in, and the land that the building is on? And then we can go toward owning the power company and the connections to anybody your servers talk to. But in practice, self-hosting is about control. If what you're running it on is a commodity cloud instance…

No. If you have dedicated hardware (rented or owned) and full disk encryption you have decent control over your data. On a virtual server you have no control and no privacy.

Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

#58

Post by newscracker »

jlkuester7 wrote: post #17

This is a pretty cool setup! I have been tinkering in the self-hosting world for awhile now and I would say my biggest piece of advice is to learn Docker. (Not trying to shill for Docker here or start a Docker vs. Ansible flame war.) In my personal experience, Docker images (and docker-compose orchestrations) are more pervasive than Ansible playbooks and when it comes to self-hosting for personal use, hosting all my…

> I would say my biggest piece of advice is to learn Docker. (Not trying to shill for Docker here

The first step to learning Docker by downloading it, irritatingly, is that getting Docker Desktop on Mac or Windows requires creating a Docker Hub account and signing in! There’s even a long issue thread about this on GitHub and the response was totally irrelevant! Luckily for those who don’t want to jump through these hoops (through disposable addresses or reusable shared logins) or provide an email address, there are many people who have posted direct links to the different downloads available.

Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

#59

Post by thinkmassive »

OJFord wrote: post #44
thinkmassive wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This project has nothing to do with Docker, and there are many reasons why someone would want to avoid running Docker on a server (a separate issue from using containers). I'm confused about why you think Docker is relevant to this set of Ansible playbooks, and also why this would only be suitable for "personal non-production use." The only requirement for a remote host to be managed by Ansible is python, and even th…

I meant easier than creating these Ansible playbooks from scratch, when many if not all of the playbooks will do the same required steps as have already been encoded in Dockerfiles in many cases by the maintainer of the upstream project (the one being deployed) itself. There certainly could be value in collecting that in one place still. The first line of the readme says it's for a 'personal cloud'.

The initial commit of this repo is from August 2013, a few months before the first public beta release of docker-compose.

Re: Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

#60

Post by CraigJPerry »

newscracker wrote: post #58
jlkuester7 wrote: post #17

This is a pretty cool setup! I have been tinkering in the self-hosting world for awhile now and I would say my biggest piece of advice is to learn Docker. (Not trying to shill for Docker here or start a Docker vs. Ansible flame war.) In my personal experience, Docker images (and docker-compose orchestrations) are more pervasive than Ansible playbooks and when it comes to self-hosting for personal use, hosting all my…

> I would say my biggest piece of advice is to learn Docker. (Not trying to shill for Docker here The first step to learning Docker by downloading it, irritatingly, is that getting Docker Desktop on Mac or Windows requires creating a Docker Hub account and signing in! There’s even a long issue thread about this on GitHub and the response was totally irrelevant! Luckily for those who don’t want to jump through these h…

I think you can use chocolatey to choco install it without going to the docker site.
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