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Comment by nullcipher | Hacker News Reader

Your comment on complex deployment reminded me of https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box#cloudron - "Web applications like email, contacts, blog, chat are the backbone of the modern internet. Yet, we live in a world where hosting these essential applications is a complex task."

What you are saying is so true. I don't understand why no standardization work is being done to make server deployments simpler with high reliability. We have some takes like cloudron, sandstorm, yunohost but nothing is "mainstream".

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No matter what OS underlies it the problems are not simple. No matter how simple the easy case is made, the complex case will stay garbage. When faced with a choice, a sysadmin that might be woken up at 5AM will pick something a bit harder to set up that's at least still recognisable and debuggable at 5AM. So we have linux, something infinitely more accessible and introspective than android.

I mean automtated driving cars is not simple either. It's not stopping people from trying.

Isn't that what people use cloud/k8s/docker for?

Edit: thinking about it, running something as a Cloudflare worker is basically this. You even get a K/V store. It's just that there isn't an "app store" for these for individuals .. for essentially market reasons (in almost all cases, you're better off using someone else's service than spinning up your own)

OP is talking about having a mechanism / Operating system for servers to easily deploy and manage. Atleast, that's what I understood from the original post. How does k8s help me deploy say a blog ? It's just too technical and geeky. If this was "Android", I just download some blog app, click and install. Don't have to worry about updates either.

Docker compose wraps the app and db in a few lines of config: https://github.com/docker/awesome-compose/tree/master/offici... the extra config is for networking / db connections - you don't get those on Android because you don't run network services on it.

K8s can do the same thing, but has more options.

You can do exactly that with a Wordpress Docker container: install and run the container, it might even spin up a database for you if part of a docker-compose or you just rely on SQLite. The technical geeky aspect comes into making your blog available to the wider web through naming, you need to configure DNS, and serve requests.

I don't see how an Android app that you can "click and install" would help to configure your DNS entries.

I think in a few years at least some self hosting will have moved to things like cloudflare tunnels and ngrok, and domains and certificates will be a "Only if I'm getting paid to deal with it" kind of thing.

Maybe to reduce latency there will be hosting services that have the tunnel proxy in the same data center as your VPS, and include the service and the subdomain with your account.

Install on what, though? Why is this preferable for the target user to just using a SaaS?

privacy, data sovereignty , data ownership ?

Would you host your email in china or say srilanka ? I prefer hosting stuff in my country .

Sandstorm was an attempt to do this, but there isn't much demand. Why install WordPress when wordpress.com will run it for you as a service?

As you sad, it was an attempt. We need more attempts.

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