Cloudron is now open source | Hacker News Reader

Cloudron is now open source

cloudron.io

50 pointsnebulon37 comments

Co-founder of cloudron here. There is a demo at https://my-demo.cloudron.me/ (username: cloudron password: cloudron). It's hidden deep below the blog post. Happy to answer any questions.

Are users shared between apps?

Yes, SSO is one of our main features. You can add users ('Users' in the menu bar). This will send them an invite. You put users in groups and assign groups to apps to indicate who can access the apps. By default, apps are locked to the Cloudron user management but you can also open up apps entirely without using the Cloudron user management (this is preferable for forums, chat etc where you want to get external users). For this, you have to read the Appstore description file usually.

(Some apps like Ghost and Mattermost are not properly integrated because they don't have LDAP in the opensource edition but it works for most apps.)

Very nice, can this be configured to use a custom SMTP server?

(That explains why i couldn't login to MM i guess?)

What is your planned revenue channel for Cloudron?

Enterprise packages? Private Clouds? Hosting?

Currently, we make money of managed hosting. But we have big dreams where everyone keeps their data and runs apps on their own server. If we can get enough users with such interest, I think there are lots of ways to make money.

I think that you should charge per server (Optionally) - just like Proxmox does, keep the entry fee low so that you can gain a lot of adoption and still keep yourself in business.

Invalid Username Password for the Demo.. Please Fix it.

Yeah, someone reset the username/password :/ This is why we cannot have nice things :-)

I just restored the Cloudron, please try again now.

Yeah, I'm quite certain that your demo will not last long. People are hammering uninstalls and account settings... :-(

I would perhaps suggest that you special case the demo to not be able to do such things. :) People aim to misbehave.

How do the security of this compare to for example Sandstorm?

Afaik, Docker is not as isolated from other hosts as Sandstorm is.

The Cloudron is intended to run on a VPS/Single tenant server. Apps get installed into this server as docker containers (this is so that apps are isolated from each other). We also have some best practices in place for Docker containers - read only root fs, non-root user etc. We also have a change coming up where apps will run with user namespaces (but it is waiting on a patch from Docker).

At the server level, the Cloudron will only expose ports from the server that the app requires. For most web apps, this means only port 443 (https) and 80. The server is otherwise completely locked down.

Thanks a lot for the reply, very informative!

There's certainly an advantage in that you can run just about any app since it's docker based.

We can support a variety of frameworks and languages very easily (thanks to Docker!):

* GitLab (rails, go)

* Mattermost, Gogs (go)

* Rocket.chat (node/meteor)

* Wordpress, Piwik, Mediawiki, Rainloop (php)

* Irc server (c++)

* Taiga (python)

Very nice, do you plan on adding a data-sharing layer on top - like sandstorm does?

Like for example, a backup app (Ex. Bacula, UrBackup) might need access to other apps files.

Or maybe a central backup solution for all/each app?

For specific case of backups, apps on cloudron are already encrypted and backed up automatically to your S3 bucket. This happens at a app level, so you can restore apps individually as well.

Though, I think you are asking if we some form data picker between apps. Like ownCloud can expose contacts that can get picked up from some mail app? Most apps these days expose a REST API. For example, GitLab sends notifications to Rocket.Chat via webhooks. I can edit files on ownCloud via webdav from my desktop and my radicale contacts are available via carddav to thunderbird. There's standards in place for each kind of data access and all these go beyond web apps.

From what I have seen, even having a simple data-sharing layer require requires modifications to apps and this is a lot of work. Like sandstorm, cozy.io also has a interesting data layer but they simply decided to just make apps of their own mostly I am guessing (just guessing :-) ) the reason is that it is very hard to modify and more importantly convince existing app authors to take their changes upstream.

Really excited to see a new addition to the open source self-hosting platform space. When we all move towards decentralization, everyone wins.

Thanks :-) As a self-hoster for many years now, I really want to make it mainstream.

It's too bad it only works on Amazon EC2 instances.

Any plans to make it work on bare-metal or proxmox?

We do have plans to support other VPS providers soon for self-hosting. DigitalOcean most likely to be the next one, as we already have great experience with their instances. However we will support providers depending on user requests, so lets us know which ones you would like to see.

How would Cloudron be related to a tool like Dokku (self hosted Heroku through Dokker)?

Dokku's target audience is developers who want to run web apps. Cloudron's target audience are the users of the app but want to run the app on their server (for privacy, ownership, control, pride etc).

If you are a developer today, you probably make a SaaS product using Dokku/Heroku.

In a Cloudron world, the developer would instead publish the app on the Cloudron Store (https://cloudron.io/appstore.html) and all people who run Cloudron will automatically get this app (no different from how smartphones + appstore works). I can simply click and install your app on _my_ server. Now, currently, people don't self-host because it's too hard to run your own server. Cloudron is trying to fix that.

What is a "small", "medium", and "large" instance? The pricing page gives me no sense of scale and what size of instance I might need.

Ah, my bad. This info is not readily visible on mobile (because it's a hover tool tip). Will fix that...

Small = 1GB RAM, Medium = 4GB RAM, Large = 8GB RAM. We generally suggest people to start out with small and take it from there. If your server is getting overloaded, it will let you know and you can simply upgrade to bigger model from the UI.

I wasn't viewing on mobile but I still missed it. Anyway, thanks for the clarification. I assumed it would be possible to upgrade, but seeing the RAM limits at least help gives me some intuition as to how much I could run at the different sizes.

Thanks for not referring to your software as an "OS" like some other projects posted here recently.

*Continue of thread below about data-sharing.

So does this mean that you use official docker images and do not compile your own?

We build our own docker images. Apps have to be packaged so that no configuration is required post-installation. For example, the user does not have to setup databases, configure email, SSO, figure out what needs to be backed up etc. You just install and you are done. We also have security requirements for running as non-root user and readonly rootfs. Most upstream images won't run with readonly.

All apps are opensource https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/ *-app .

Nice, i tried to register an account on your gitlab (to report an issue) but didn't get any conformation e-mail.

(OpenProject can't create new projects using cloudron user)

EDIT: Resolved by friendly email ;)

Sounds a lot like Openshift from Redhat?

The key thing is that platforms like Openshift are designed for enterprise deployment and developer use, while platforms like Cloudron are designed for personal and consumer use.

How? You'd need someone to develop the app you're deploying. Openshift is pretty straight forward using the gui web interface.

Openshift is more like a PaaS. It's like self-hosting Heroku (and dokku). See my answer for Dokku - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12400798. Since this thread got a bit old, feel free to email me at girish@cloudron.io to discuss further :-)

can i run cloudron on my home server? how?

Currently, no. It is really designed to run on a VPS/EC2.

For ec2, https://cloudron.io/references/selfhosting.html

Oh, too bad - we explicitly run a private cloud.

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