Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

https://github.com/search?q=%22cloudinabottle.toml%22&type=i...

Currently, a lot of this space is docker compose based and simply inaccessible to so many who may otherwise be interested. Whether or not it's this project or another, I hope something gathers enough steam soon to truly break the barriers to entry.

I'm working on a project with similar goals but some different design decisions - instead of the typical containers I'm going for thin-client apps that hit a common data layer built on a fully serverless architecture. Not ready for production quite yet, but for those interested: https://starkeep.app/

The docs mention cloudinabottle.toml but the app repos all have openhost.toml. Did you folks change the name of the platform?

Also, can you point to how the unified auth works? Couldn't find anything in the manifest spec.

I’m trying to self-host as much of my stuff as possible, but don’t have time to tinker like I used to. Hence updates, backups (etc) fall by the wayside in favour of “set and forget”.

Looking at your hosted page, I see no reference to backups. I see in your docs reference to backup, but you should definitely offer some sort of turnkey, appropriately-marked-up backup solution. Configuration difficulty is what kills self-hosting on the front end, updates make it hard over time, but when it all dies and then I have no backup is when I give up.

I can't find any reference to disk size limits anywhere. Can I host Immich on this? Can I host my media server? What will it cost? Surely not $10/month for my media collection. I'm not a hoarder and mostly have stuff ripped from my personally-owned media, which limits the size, and you're still not hosting that for $10/month. I see you have Jellyfin in the set of apps but I don't know what it will cost. The CPU & RAM limits I understand from the deploy page.

Oh, and I'm specifically referring to your hosted service here.

Since we have AI now, I think exe.dev's pitch is better: they provide Linux VMs, a web proxy, and integrations. You can ask the AI to build whatever web app you like. I'd love to have exe.dev, but running on my Mac Mini.

If you're building a personal cloud, you also want your AI connected to it, but probably with some degree of management. Aperture already provides a fair amount in this area, and probably with a connector for Cloud in a Bottle, could give your AI safe access.

I did a few pitches related to this at Nasscom Startup warehouse and IITM RTBI. Though this was welcomed by the panel members but it never took off due to lack of capital for such a startup during those times in India. I had to abandon and focus on my day job.

I picked it a few years ago for much the same reason as anyone else (sick of this shit), and it's main attraction to me was it being a turnkey solution that focus security so i wasn't as likely to completely fuck everything important up.

I think a "simple" installation package would be very attractive to most people, and while cosmos has a lot of growing to do in order to be that, I'm still pretty happy with it.

I'm even more happy to see more in this space, because I'm just at the point of "do i stick with cosmos or do i start rolling it all myself" and god the leap is terrifying if you're thinking of exposing to the internet. I get it, but at the same time it feels like you're always one missed config away from a potential nightmare, and that's after the "welp guess this is my second job" problem.

So no fail over/redundancy? I think at minimum it should be two machines, so one can break. That is one of the important features of cloud applications as far as I'm concerned.

You don't have to deal with the problem of a single computer breaking.

This is just rose tinted vision of the past. None of the software of the past had the capability, reliability or robustness of modern sass.

Then I decided to painfully break out of vendor lock-in, built my own NAS with FreeNAS which was all the rage (still attached to a vendor, but at least I could control the hardware). This was before Docker really took off - the plugins were installed in FreeBSD jails. It worked for a while, but again, plugins could be woefully out of date and broken, upgrading the OS was a pain and would break all your plugins.

Through the 10+ years of this... I now follow two simple rules: - separate your network storage and application hosting. Yes, it complicates things a little bit with NFS setups but it is a forcing function for a more resilient setup - use the docker container provided by the maintainers or LinuxServer.io. Vendor maintained wrappers can be initially helpful but end up as a form of tech debt when they're abandoned or neutered - especially when they're freemium and the company starts looking to squeeze.

The quiet part of self-hosting is that it shifts the responsibility of security to the user. I'm sure cloudinabottle has more sensible defaults than provided docker containers, or builds in reverse proxies etc, but I doubt they're offering to take on liability for data loss or breaches.

The problem I see you'll face are two-fold: 1. Projects like this have the power users self-select away from it and those who need a lot of hand-holding to self-select into it. If I know how to configure and deploy a docker container already I have no incentive to contribute. ReadyNAS got around this by having folks charge for their plugins (that were just OSS projects packaged up for their OS) but then it ruins the appeal, they likely only got away with it because they were only a couple of bucks and you were already locked in to the ecosystem via the hardware. 2. If the hosted aspect actually makes you money, required for the project to be continued long term, capitalism will ensure that incumbent cloud providers take that away from you by offering ready-made instances at your cost-price, like they did with redis, elasticsearch etc.

Note that these are only issues if you're motivated by making a profit, or even a cost-neutral project. But if this is a charitable exercise backed by an entity that doesn't need the money, I wish you all the best - more things that let people dip their toes in are good! The cloud is all rent-seeking subscriptions and even with the recent supply shortages: fast, small, low-power compute is incredibly cheap these days, especially old business/mini machines.

If you want to message me, find my email on https://qbix.com/about

https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/setup/shared_homeserver.html

There's no reason this couldn't be made as simple as double clicking a .exe and then the whole thing gets setup.