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PikaPods – Instant Open Source App Hosting

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Re: PikaPods – Instant Open Source App Hosting

#51
Would a Plex pikapod make sense? I'd worry about bandwidth costs. I ask because a buddy was saying he wanted his own Plex instance, but doesn't have the inclination or time to figure out the hardware.

Another suggestion might be Minecraft. My nephews have casually said they'd like their own server.

Re: PikaPods – Instant Open Source App Hosting

#52
post #50
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sharing the kernel or are users placed inside separate VMs? The isolation is with users and SELinux. There are no VMs as those are pretty heavy. > the pricing is only listed as monthly. Is there more granular pricing? Pricing is with hourly granularity, but shown as monthly for simplicity. > What about storage/disk/volume encryption? We run only bare-metal servers, so this is less of a concern unless you expect the…

>> What about storage/disk/volume encryption? > We run only bare-metal servers, so this is less of a concern unless you expect the whole server to be stolen. Data still needs to be accessible all the time. So, when I delete a file and it is marked as deleted in the file system and it becomes empty space, then when this same space gets allocated for someone else, they can just read my file from the allocated empty spa…

> Leaving it unencrypted exposes my data to all other users of the system.

This would be an issue if we would offer access to block devices. That’s not the case. The pod can only see the files and not read at the block level. Else every shared hosting setup would have this issue.

I’ll still look into it and see if there is any action needed. And the potential overhead for encrypting only the mounted user files. My feeling is that it’s pretty doable.

Re: PikaPods – Instant Open Source App Hosting

#53
post #25

Sounds a lot like sandcats (/sandstorm), albeit slightly less ambitious?

Sandstorm is an open source platform, and this sounds like it is not. But Sandstorm used to offer managed hosting and no longer does, so they fill different niches. I can't run PikaPods in my house and you can't subscribe to Sandstorm right now for someone else to run. (Theoretically you can, but nobody is selling.)

It'd be cool to see a service like PikaPods built around Sandstorm as the platform layer, but there's a LOT of work to do to make Sandstorm a good idea to run commercially, and since we aren't running it as such, nobody's really working on those things.

Re: PikaPods – Instant Open Source App Hosting

#54
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sandstorm uses Vagrant as part of the app packaging (for developers) process. It is _not_ used in everyday use of Sandstorm. Instead, "Sandstorm implements fine-grained containers"[1], not VMs. 1: https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/using/security-practices...

I see. So it’s like Docker, but their own implementation? Can’t wrap my head around it right now.

Sandstorm has a pretty unique sandboxing model, which makes it drastically more secure than Docker in practice, but the tradeoffs in terms of packaging differences can be significant.

One of the biggest things is that Sandstorm prefers to sandbox individual documents versus applications, which mitigates a huge variety of security flaws in apps. In most cases vulnerabilities in apps on Sandstorm are not exploitable when run on Sandstorm.

It also manages most authentication and authorization roles for apps in an integrated way, which requires more integration work than just spinning up a Docker container.

Feel free to hit me up if you want to know more, though it would be a lot of work to make Sandstorm work for your business model at this point. It's cool seeing others in the "make open source web apps user-friendly to run" space though.

Re: PikaPods – Instant Open Source App Hosting

#55
I heard of this service recently from somewhere else too. Sounds really great; pricing is quite fair. This is the kind of service we need nowadays - where some software i can self-host, and others i can pay someone (like pikapods) to manage for me (at least at some lower/base level anyway). Good luck!

Re: PikaPods – Instant Open Source App Hosting

#56
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sandstorm uses Vagrant as part of the app packaging (for developers) process. It is _not_ used in everyday use of Sandstorm. Instead, "Sandstorm implements fine-grained containers"[1], not VMs. 1: https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/using/security-practices...

I see. So it’s like Docker, but their own implementation? Can’t wrap my head around it right now.

See also this blog post: https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker-apps

Re: PikaPods – Instant Open Source App Hosting

#59

Would a Plex pikapod make sense? I'd worry about bandwidth costs. I ask because a buddy was saying he wanted his own Plex instance, but doesn't have the inclination or time to figure out the hardware. Another suggestion might be Minecraft. My nephews have casually said they'd like their own server.

This app seems to target open source projects but Plex and Minecraft aren't open source

Re: PikaPods – Instant Open Source App Hosting

#60
post #56
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see. So it’s like Docker, but their own implementation? Can’t wrap my head around it right now.

See also this blog post: https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker-apps

Thanks! Will read this later in detail and see if anything can be learnt.

I do want to point out that this is from 2014 and we don't use Docker at PikaPods. We use Red Hat's stack, which integrates better with other Linux tools, like SELinux and Systemd.

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