There are already multiple implementations of this:
- nextcloud (https://nextcloud.com/), more like a "dropbox-like" with added applications
- sandstorm (https://sandstorm.io/), with a high focus on security
- yunohost (https://yunohost.org/#/), a full-on debian distribution with all the scaffolding to one-click install known applications (mail server, file storage, IM server and client, ...). All linux software can be used as an "app". The process to make it into an app is the same as creating a package for a distribution, except specifically for this one. The good thing is that installation is way easier than using a package manager and configuring the database for the user, etc... It seems to be the most in line with the author's vision.
“If you were using federated Kuberenetes with node auto-scaling and the latest cloud-native AI-enabled service discovery OSS tools for geographically aware traffic distribution your static site wouldn’t have gone down.”
It's a static site FFS! Erols and ServInt were serving 3k requests per second on a Pentium in the nineties using Apache and SCSI disks with no acceleration, no http cache, no memcache because that 2KB page fits into OS disk cache!
Me too. I like Twilio, but Anveo.com is worth checking out as well. They have a visual call flow handler that's pretty cool/capable, and like Twilio, are pretty cheap.
This is a really cool idea. In fact, I was thinking about it but in the form of a PC [1].
Most desktop computers today are a magnitude more powerful then the small VMs we rent on the cloud. While you go on with your day, your desktop computer can be put to work in Your service.
When openssl has a bug, who notices, decides, installs the new package and restarts all the dependent services?
That person or group has the actual control over your personal cloud server. And it's more efficient, and thus cheaper, if they are a large scale organization. Once again it will be more attractive to most people to centralize.
I like the sentiment (and run my own Synology NAS to sort of achieve this), but I'm trying to understand the difference between saying "my second phone is in the cloud" and "I want my phone to be a thin client for a server that I run using open standards".
Is there any meaningful difference? I feel like the second idea has been around for a while.
Incidentally, because I've read so many articles recently bemoaning the state of the iPad, I think if Apple really embraced the "thin client" model for the iPad, they would have a much better shot at product market fit. For example, if the iPad could seamlessly view and edit files from, say, any SMB server as easily as it can from iCloud, I think that would get people excited. It would be decoupling the interface from the underlying standard, but also make sure that they work well together. Who knows, it also might lead to having a standard file format where we're missing them today, e.g., for handwritten notes?
> For example, if the iPad could seamlessly view and edit files from, say, any SMB server as easily as it can from iCloud, I think that would get people excited.
This is actually an advertised feature of iOS 13, and I did get very excited about it when it was released last year. Unfortunately, it’s completely unusable; browsing a directory with more than 100 children or copying more than a few megabytes of data is likely to freeze or crash Files, and I’ve even managed to get the app into a broken state that can’t be fixed with an iOS reboot. The same applies to the USB drive “support.” Don’t trust anyone who tells you the iPad Pro is a viable laptop replacement if you need a working filesystem.
This is great to see and is pretty much the same reason why we have initially started with Cloudron [1]. There are not many technical reasons why running your own apps on the server has to be harder than using a phone. There are tons of great apps already out there and from my perspective the biggest issue, as mentioned in the blog post, is the onboarding and ease of installation/maintenance of those apps including the server itself. The building blocks are all available but as a complete solution hard to use, unless one is a kind of a sysamdmin. This makes it just very exclusive. If you ever tried to setup your own email server there is so much crud work to be done and things to be learned. Learning about this is as such a great opportunity to understand the underlying technology and how things work together, but it is also a huge barrier.
I tried cloudron recently and the experience was pretty smooth. However the 30$/month price tag put me off. Yunohost offers the same (please correct me, if cloudron has features yunohost doesn't have) for free, and it's hard to compete with free.
- The "appstore"-like experience already exists in the ecosystem, in a sense. You have package managers with post-install and configuration scripts (Installing slapd for example yields a perfectly functioning instance within 2 minutes), or maybe Ansible playbooks that run the instance with a simple file configuration and one command.
For package managers, it all depends on the packaging.
- Again the ecosystem somewhat already exists in a way if you consider Docker for example. All the dependencies are neatly packaged, and if you think kubernetes, then you you have helm as the appstore. It even solves the possible problems with ports and schenanigans that the user mentions. (But again, post-install triggers in debconf for ufw on ubuntu for example already do this. It all depends on the packaging.)
But as the author points out, not everyone is keen on hitting the terminal, but that has been a problem (or rather a business opportunity) for long enough that there are solid, uncomplicated and perhaps way more convenient (and eco-friendly) ways to achieve what the author is thinking of accomplishing.
One thing that comes to mind is the amazing Synology products. In fact, they implement the exact vision of the author: Run your software on your NAS, and have a dynamic DNS graciously provided by synology to access it. E-mail server, file sharing, photos app, even photo recognition, and a plethora of other stuff. You can even run VMs or Docker on it ! And all within the synology appstore (with some magic nat traversal I presume because it does not need any port forwarding)
And that is just one example of something I've seen and witnessed to work very well and reliably too.
I guess what I'm saying is, the author's vision is shared amongst a lot of people and there may even be commercial solutions out there that implement it. But I would for sure love to see an open-source attempt. In fact, I think there's already one that I'm just not aware of.
I'm trying to create EXACTLY this with my latest project (https://www.aspen.cloud) and it is challenging to find the right balance between ease of use and decentralization. The path we're taking is a service that you can pay for and we provide everything you need or you host it yourself. Because sometimes letting experts manage your system is more reliable and you can avoid getting the hug of death like this site!
The idea of owning your personal computer in the cloud with instant, always updating apps completely in your control seems inevitable but making something easy for anyone to use will take time. That's why we're focusing on the developer experience to make it simple and cheap to make apps in this new paradigm while shaping the experience for the end user so it does ultimately feel as simple as using the App Store.
Would you consider open sourcing it in the future? If not the hosted option not only competes with products such as GSuite but it 'll be hard to get adoption from the self hosted crowd.
So... VDI, but for Phones? VPI? Seems like a cool idea worth some effort to streamline.
These days, it's fairly inexpensive to get a home server, set up a VPN server, and run stuff like a web browser through RDP. Guacamole (https://guacamole.apache.org/) makes desktop apps through a web browser even simpler.
Again, setting all this up is more than trivial, but I believe it's something that could be a "one-click app" for a VPS. See https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/
I 've been using nextcloudpi on an rpi for 3 years to achieve most of what the author describes. It's been awesome and I d suggest people give it a try.
I've been thinking about and working on the same problem for a while. My conclusion is that this has to be done with a physical device of some kind over which the user has physical control. Otherwise whoever provides the personal cloud servers ends up being the centralized lock-in element in the system.
Am I right in the inking that even if a big tech company did this it could still be good. Because they are just providing the ‘device’ like Apple do now. I guess they would still have power over what you could / could not install though.
I get wanting to be serverless, but hosting the static parts using S3 and doing clever database things using Lambda and DynamoDB also achieves that goal, while surviving the hug of death.
Dynamo DB does not survive the hug of death unless configured to do so and can be very expensive if you don't design the data access pattern will.
The author is trying to stick to free tier, so if it's set to the max (5 records/sec), and no caching, it probably can only handle 1 visitor every 2 seconds after the bucket of 1500 read tokens is used up.
If it's doing scans at all, the DB will be shot in seconds.
Really need CloudFront in front of something like this to survive and lighten the DB access
Thought this was going to be more literally. A phone-virtual-machine, for stuff like your robot vacuum cleaner to keep it from infesting your real phone and spy on you.
If apps on personal servers can’t collect data, then they will need to charge money in order to have an economic incentive to support the app, ship updates, upgrade UI, etc. If there is a competing “free” option then from a centralized monolith, then it’s going to be very difficult for the PCC app to deal with.
Paid apps are also inherently less viral and can’t tap into network effects as well due to the friction resulting from payments. In order to overcome this, PCC apps need to develop a viable revenue model without putting a paywall.
I see the PCC model work for applications where neither the consumer and the business want to store sensitive data because the security overhead is too high.
E.g. trading bot that doesn’t want to store user’s API keys. In fact, running private servers is something that is pretty common in that world.
Second I think people in general are becoming more aware that free online stuff usually comes with a hidden cost to privacy.
Third there is a whole swath of online services that can't thrive in current situation: services that are too uninteresting (from a data harvesting pov or no tie-in to larger offering) to run for free, and not valuable enough for the user to pay $7/month for, and not worth running as a SaaS at a lower price. Yet if a user had a cloud OS with metered resources, they could run such an app for a few bucks a year (plus a few bucks donation/paid to the app dev). And they'd never have to worry about it shutting down because the dev wants to do something else with their lives.
> I see the PCC model work for applications where neither the consumer and the business want to store sensitive data because the security overhead is too high.
I agree. I think apps that have both a basic and premium version can really thrive on a platform like this where useful apps are not competing with VC-fueled or ad-driven apps and the utility to the user is very clear. Data mining has really gotten out of hand and caused the value-add to the user to become extremely distorted. User attention has been the only metric that free apps are fighting for which is a zero-sum game and not good for anyone.
I'm most excited by the idea of applications being able to be more closely connected and even create new types of apps that just layer on top or extend existing app data.
There's always the App.net business model where some of your hosting fee gets passed on to the apps that you run but the resulting revenue would probably be small.
[+] [-] rakoo|6 years ago|reply
- nextcloud (https://nextcloud.com/), more like a "dropbox-like" with added applications - sandstorm (https://sandstorm.io/), with a high focus on security - yunohost (https://yunohost.org/#/), a full-on debian distribution with all the scaffolding to one-click install known applications (mail server, file storage, IM server and client, ...). All linux software can be used as an "app". The process to make it into an app is the same as creating a package for a distribution, except specifically for this one. The good thing is that installation is way easier than using a package manager and configuring the database for the user, etc... It seems to be the most in line with the author's vision.
[+] [-] jvalleroy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indigodaddy|6 years ago|reply
https://www.turnkeylinux.org/lxc
[+] [-] funfunfunction|6 years ago|reply
“If you were using federated Kuberenetes with node auto-scaling and the latest cloud-native AI-enabled service discovery OSS tools for geographically aware traffic distribution your static site wouldn’t have gone down.”
[+] [-] Aperocky|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tudorw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ikurei|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] numpad0|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ernsheong|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notyourday|6 years ago|reply
It's a static site FFS! Erols and ServInt were serving 3k requests per second on a Pentium in the nineties using Apache and SCSI disks with no acceleration, no http cache, no memcache because that 2KB page fits into OS disk cache!
[+] [-] wbl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsync|6 years ago|reply
That is not what this article was about.
[+] [-] tyingq|6 years ago|reply
The UI is a little 90's looking, but it's very powerful. For me, I spend less time fighting an API, python, etc, and more time tweaking the flow to get it right: https://www.anveo.com/consumer/features.asp?code=ivrcallflow
[+] [-] HugoHobling|6 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20835428
I'll possibly put a post together if anyone is interested.
[+] [-] nkg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mymindstorm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JadoJodo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jborichevskiy|6 years ago|reply
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lIMDg7...
[+] [-] vasco|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aj7|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ibudiallo|6 years ago|reply
Most desktop computers today are a magnitude more powerful then the small VMs we rent on the cloud. While you go on with your day, your desktop computer can be put to work in Your service.
[1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/bringing-back-the-pc
[+] [-] bla3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OJFord|6 years ago|reply
Agree that it sounds exactly like what OP is imagining, website even has the copy 'installing apps is as easy as on your phone'.
I also think Urbit is similar, but frankly I've always been too confused by the space analogies that project uses to be sure.
[+] [-] lostmsu|6 years ago|reply
They did acquire it, so it probably was a good exit for the original devs.
And to become ready for public consumption some investment in UX was clearly needed, including a better store and some basic apps.
[+] [-] dsr_|6 years ago|reply
When openssl has a bug, who notices, decides, installs the new package and restarts all the dependent services?
That person or group has the actual control over your personal cloud server. And it's more efficient, and thus cheaper, if they are a large scale organization. Once again it will be more attractive to most people to centralize.
[+] [-] iamdamian|6 years ago|reply
Is there any meaningful difference? I feel like the second idea has been around for a while.
Incidentally, because I've read so many articles recently bemoaning the state of the iPad, I think if Apple really embraced the "thin client" model for the iPad, they would have a much better shot at product market fit. For example, if the iPad could seamlessly view and edit files from, say, any SMB server as easily as it can from iCloud, I think that would get people excited. It would be decoupling the interface from the underlying standard, but also make sure that they work well together. Who knows, it also might lead to having a standard file format where we're missing them today, e.g., for handwritten notes?
[+] [-] sjy|6 years ago|reply
This is actually an advertised feature of iOS 13, and I did get very excited about it when it was released last year. Unfortunately, it’s completely unusable; browsing a directory with more than 100 children or copying more than a few megabytes of data is likely to freeze or crash Files, and I’ve even managed to get the app into a broken state that can’t be fixed with an iOS reboot. The same applies to the USB drive “support.” Don’t trust anyone who tells you the iPad Pro is a viable laptop replacement if you need a working filesystem.
[+] [-] Terretta|6 years ago|reply
Try ‘add server’ in iPad’s “Files” app?
http://osxdaily.com/2019/11/04/how-connect-smb-share-iphone-...
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nebulon|6 years ago|reply
1. https://cloudron.io
[+] [-] zufallsheld|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aneutron|6 years ago|reply
- The "appstore"-like experience already exists in the ecosystem, in a sense. You have package managers with post-install and configuration scripts (Installing slapd for example yields a perfectly functioning instance within 2 minutes), or maybe Ansible playbooks that run the instance with a simple file configuration and one command. For package managers, it all depends on the packaging.
- Again the ecosystem somewhat already exists in a way if you consider Docker for example. All the dependencies are neatly packaged, and if you think kubernetes, then you you have helm as the appstore. It even solves the possible problems with ports and schenanigans that the user mentions. (But again, post-install triggers in debconf for ufw on ubuntu for example already do this. It all depends on the packaging.)
But as the author points out, not everyone is keen on hitting the terminal, but that has been a problem (or rather a business opportunity) for long enough that there are solid, uncomplicated and perhaps way more convenient (and eco-friendly) ways to achieve what the author is thinking of accomplishing.
One thing that comes to mind is the amazing Synology products. In fact, they implement the exact vision of the author: Run your software on your NAS, and have a dynamic DNS graciously provided by synology to access it. E-mail server, file sharing, photos app, even photo recognition, and a plethora of other stuff. You can even run VMs or Docker on it ! And all within the synology appstore (with some magic nat traversal I presume because it does not need any port forwarding)
And that is just one example of something I've seen and witnessed to work very well and reliably too.
I guess what I'm saying is, the author's vision is shared amongst a lot of people and there may even be commercial solutions out there that implement it. But I would for sure love to see an open-source attempt. In fact, I think there's already one that I'm just not aware of.
[+] [-] matlin|6 years ago|reply
The idea of owning your personal computer in the cloud with instant, always updating apps completely in your control seems inevitable but making something easy for anyone to use will take time. That's why we're focusing on the developer experience to make it simple and cheap to make apps in this new paradigm while shaping the experience for the end user so it does ultimately feel as simple as using the App Store.
[+] [-] Iolaum|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2038AD|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elagost|6 years ago|reply
These days, it's fairly inexpensive to get a home server, set up a VPN server, and run stuff like a web browser through RDP. Guacamole (https://guacamole.apache.org/) makes desktop apps through a web browser even simpler.
Again, setting all this up is more than trivial, but I believe it's something that could be a "one-click app" for a VPS. See https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/
[+] [-] 627467|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Iolaum|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dboreham|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonplackett|6 years ago|reply
Am I right in the inking that even if a big tech company did this it could still be good. Because they are just providing the ‘device’ like Apple do now. I guess they would still have power over what you could / could not install though.
[+] [-] llarsson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ldoughty|6 years ago|reply
The author is trying to stick to free tier, so if it's set to the max (5 records/sec), and no caching, it probably can only handle 1 visitor every 2 seconds after the bucket of 1500 read tokens is used up.
If it's doing scans at all, the DB will be shot in seconds.
Really need CloudFront in front of something like this to survive and lighten the DB access
[+] [-] tjoff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anthonyhodlbot|6 years ago|reply
Paid apps are also inherently less viral and can’t tap into network effects as well due to the friction resulting from payments. In order to overcome this, PCC apps need to develop a viable revenue model without putting a paywall.
I see the PCC model work for applications where neither the consumer and the business want to store sensitive data because the security overhead is too high.
E.g. trading bot that doesn’t want to store user’s API keys. In fact, running private servers is something that is pretty common in that world.
[+] [-] teleclimber|6 years ago|reply
First this is a great space for open source apps.
Second I think people in general are becoming more aware that free online stuff usually comes with a hidden cost to privacy.
Third there is a whole swath of online services that can't thrive in current situation: services that are too uninteresting (from a data harvesting pov or no tie-in to larger offering) to run for free, and not valuable enough for the user to pay $7/month for, and not worth running as a SaaS at a lower price. Yet if a user had a cloud OS with metered resources, they could run such an app for a few bucks a year (plus a few bucks donation/paid to the app dev). And they'd never have to worry about it shutting down because the dev wants to do something else with their lives.
[+] [-] matlin|6 years ago|reply
I agree. I think apps that have both a basic and premium version can really thrive on a platform like this where useful apps are not competing with VC-fueled or ad-driven apps and the utility to the user is very clear. Data mining has really gotten out of hand and caused the value-add to the user to become extremely distorted. User attention has been the only metric that free apps are fighting for which is a zero-sum game and not good for anyone.
I'm most excited by the idea of applications being able to be more closely connected and even create new types of apps that just layer on top or extend existing app data.
[+] [-] wmf|6 years ago|reply