This just looks like expensive managed hosting. It's still just cloud hosting on someone else's hardware.
For truly personal 'cloud' apps, I recommend projects like Freedombox or Sandstorm. They make it this easy to deploy cloud apps on hardware you actually physically own and control.
IMO people who aren't political dissidents are generally better served by renting reliable resources in a datacenter with good bandwidth than running flaky hardware in their home off their broadband. Fortunately the sticker shock of a $200 box vs. $10/month will mostly take care of this issue.
I think this is much easier for the average consumer. Reminds me of the old "virtual hosting" platforms that made it easy enough for your grandma to set up & maintain a website. I like it.
We're trying to make it as close to self-managed as a sysadmin running their own machine in a colo. We're not there yet but that's where we're headed. Sandstorm is working on a hosting service as well.
The only way you can truly control a server, as an individual, is by running it out of your home. The problem with servers at home is that most residential internet is terrible for running servers on.
I did a quick comparison with DigitalOcean, and it looks like equal (obviously, with more features). What's cheaper cloud hosting than DO (that's not crap)?
Advice: Link your actual app store/list somewhere. On an app-based platform, most people's first question is "what apps can I run on it?"
I think I saw your thing before at an earlier stage because I'm heavily interested in/messing with Sandstorm.io. There's a lot of stuff you can currently run on this that would not work (yet) on Sandstorm, which is cool. Particularly a game server like Minecraft.
My question is what kind of security is employed to ensure apps are frequently updated, apps cannot interfere with other apps, etc.?
You may want to fix how your Terms of Service is presented. On Firefox, it does not word wrap, and scrolls horizontally... pretty much indefinitely inside that box.
Thanks for the detailed feedback. We used to list apps that we have got working ourselves but we decided it's not a great idea to try to support a bunch of third-party open source apps ourselves. We hope we can encourage the actual developers to let users load their app on Portal, it's pretty simple usually. We definitely need some examples though.
Each app is a separate KVM virtual machine. By default, apps only have access to data they've created, not the data of other apps. Apps can communicate over a private (virtual) "LAN" using private IPs. An app's LAN and Internet access can also be disabled.
Our idea for keeping apps up to date is to replace the entire operating system and app software every time the app VM starts up. For example, restarting an app based on "ubuntu14lts" loads the latest daily release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with all its security patches.
The only thing that survives an app restart is the /data drive, with the idea that not even a rootkit will be cleared by a simple restart.
We're already working with some developers to make personal cloud server apps and really want to encourage more developers to start. There are thousands of apps that need to be written and it's a lot more fun than working in propriety mobile environments!
And it's not just about writing "Portal apps", we want every app that runs on Portal to also run on competing personal cloud server platforms. That's what true decentralization requires.
So, have you looked into how Sandstorm packages files, and whether one of your JSON manifests could be easily added next to a Sandstorm package in order to run it? Or, oppositely, could your platform install an app based on a provided SPK file (and it's own built-in manifest)?
The biggest difference is that it looks like you have people include a script to install the app, and Sandstorm packages the app and all it's dependencies 'pre-installed', and is mostly independent of Linux flavor.
Since Sandstorm packages have all the dependencies and app data in read-only, and all of the user's app data in /var, I would think it'd be relatively possible to figure out how to get the two formats to play nice.
Please post this again when it doesn't come with "Current users of the service should be expect frequent downtime and even data loss during the Developer Release period. "
I think we may have gone overboard with the wording there!
Updated to more accurately reflect the situation:
Current users of the service should expect some downtime and must careful to backup their data during the Developer Release period.
We haven't had any unexpected downtime or data loss with current users, we just wanted to make sure to warn people that they're using something so new. Thanks!
It isn't. We've been working for 6 months since the last submission, it's a completely different version of the web site and service, and we're open to anyone for the first time. We're not launching to the general public yet, we're still just looking for more feedback and help from others on HN.
dublinben|10 years ago
For truly personal 'cloud' apps, I recommend projects like Freedombox or Sandstorm. They make it this easy to deploy cloud apps on hardware you actually physically own and control.
wmf|10 years ago
peterwwillis|10 years ago
portalplatform|10 years ago
The only way you can truly control a server, as an individual, is by running it out of your home. The problem with servers at home is that most residential internet is terrible for running servers on.
routelastresort|10 years ago
ocdtrekkie|10 years ago
I think I saw your thing before at an earlier stage because I'm heavily interested in/messing with Sandstorm.io. There's a lot of stuff you can currently run on this that would not work (yet) on Sandstorm, which is cool. Particularly a game server like Minecraft.
My question is what kind of security is employed to ensure apps are frequently updated, apps cannot interfere with other apps, etc.?
You may want to fix how your Terms of Service is presented. On Firefox, it does not word wrap, and scrolls horizontally... pretty much indefinitely inside that box.
portalplatform|10 years ago
Each app is a separate KVM virtual machine. By default, apps only have access to data they've created, not the data of other apps. Apps can communicate over a private (virtual) "LAN" using private IPs. An app's LAN and Internet access can also be disabled.
Our idea for keeping apps up to date is to replace the entire operating system and app software every time the app VM starts up. For example, restarting an app based on "ubuntu14lts" loads the latest daily release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with all its security patches.
The only thing that survives an app restart is the /data drive, with the idea that not even a rootkit will be cleared by a simple restart.
portalplatform|10 years ago
And it's not just about writing "Portal apps", we want every app that runs on Portal to also run on competing personal cloud server platforms. That's what true decentralization requires.
ocdtrekkie|10 years ago
The biggest difference is that it looks like you have people include a script to install the app, and Sandstorm packages the app and all it's dependencies 'pre-installed', and is mostly independent of Linux flavor.
Since Sandstorm packages have all the dependencies and app data in read-only, and all of the user's app data in /var, I would think it'd be relatively possible to figure out how to get the two formats to play nice.
skrowl|10 years ago
portalplatform|10 years ago
Updated to more accurately reflect the situation:
Current users of the service should expect some downtime and must careful to backup their data during the Developer Release period.
We haven't had any unexpected downtime or data loss with current users, we just wanted to make sure to warn people that they're using something so new. Thanks!
devicenull|10 years ago
general_failure|10 years ago
We are working on a similar product at Cloudron (https://www.cloudron.io). We use containers instead of kvm.
portalplatform|10 years ago
dang|10 years ago
portalplatform|10 years ago
How is this not 100% in the spirit of Show HN?
ocdtrekkie|10 years ago