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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

#71

Post by dcardoza »

zzzeek wrote: post #70
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 run everything in containers and I spin up all the images / containers from ansible scripts. Am I doing it wrong? I didn't think these two tools were in conflict.

They do complement one another but docker has tooling that solves similar problems. Does docker-compose (https://docs.docker.com/compose/) fit your needs?

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

#72

Post by mindslight »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #61
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 never really saw Ansible as a heavy tool. But a place I worked at in the past used cfengine, so my barometer for this is probably a bit different.

You had a point about error checking that I think is pertinent to my not being in Ansible's niche. If a service fails to start on a single host, it's because I'm already tinkering with that configuration and hence will notice the failure. Whereas with tens of highly similar hosts, you want to find out about exceptions sooner. I'm actually getting to this point with some common things (apt upgrade), hence looking into Ansible again recently.

Overall my goal is to write very few on-host configuration scripts, and prefer overwriting files. For example, most triggers are simply service restarts, which can also be performed by a full reboot.

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

#73

Post by mindslight »

asokoloski wrote: post #54
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.

Fabric seems more down to earth, but doesn't itself solve the problem of actually defining the configuration of each host.

Having said that, I am to the point where it would be really nice if my ssh pushes ran in parallel, which is one of those robust niceties you give up by going your own way. So I'll have to revisit Fabric because it would be complementary - thanks for the reminder!

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

#74

Post by JackRabbitSlim »

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…

You should check out Saltstack if you haven't already. It's actually not far from what your doing now...

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

#75

Post by solarkraft »

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

Interesting stack. From a first glance it seems to be a bunch of self-made Dockerfiles with an extra manifest. I like the idea, but wouldn't want anything proprietary for this relatively simple task.

I suppose this product isn't for me anyway, since eventually (not that long ago) I just bit the bullet and learned the basics of Docker and docker-compose. It's not that hard, costs nothing and is pretty rewarding, imo.

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

#76

Post by zapt02 »

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

For anyone looking for a free alternative to this, check out: https://caprover.com/

It has many of the same apps as Cloudron and is completely free. And you can of course host your own Dockerfiles on top of it.

I think the pricing for Cloudron is way off. I'm not going to spend 5 dollars per month for a DigitalOcean droplet and then 30 dollars per month to host a few open-source apps on that Droplet. Especially since CapRover does 99% of this for free.

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

#77

Post by chishaku »

ggregoire wrote: post #40
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…

> Not trying to start a Docker vs. Ansible flame war Don't worry, they serve very different purposes. You already probably know but Docker is for running applications in isolation, while Ansible is for provisioning and configuring hosts. For instance, you won't use Docker to harden sshd on your hosts but Ansible.

They definitely have overlap. People use Ansible for much more than hardening sshd.

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

#78

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

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…

Sandstorm was a really nice solution to this, but it required each app to be integrated with it, which I personally think is what killed it. (Which sucked, because for what it supported it was the best option available)

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

#79

Post by onei »

dcardoza wrote: post #71
zzzeek wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run everything in containers and I spin up all the images / containers from ansible scripts. Am I doing it wrong? I didn't think these two tools were in conflict.

They do complement one another but docker has tooling that solves similar problems. Does docker-compose ( https://docs.docker.com/compose/ ) fit your needs?

I tend to run ansible to setup a VM, e.g. a few packages, lock it down to my taste, and then have ansible run docker-compose to deploy the application(s) of interest.

You wouldn't use docker to manage the host networking (which is where ansible comes in), but packaging whatever is listening on ports as a container works really well for me

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

#80

Post by crmrc114 »

Dumb question maybe... but why would you not just configure this yourself on a single virt/host? Most of these services would take less than a day to configure. So many questions on why this is a good thing.

Like, there are countless ways to configure your MTA and spam filtering- if you are going to have to dig through this config.. why not just roll your own?

Can someone explain to me why you need ansimble for this? or am I just being stupid and this is like an exercise to show what the toolchain can do?

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