Sandstorm App update: New open-source self-hostable apps

https://sandstorm.io/news/2016-01-22-8-new-open-source-apps

by andybak • 10 years ago

152 60 10 years ago

andybak• 10 years ago

I'd love to hear from people that are using Sandstorm day to day.

The only thing stopping me that none of the current apps fill a need that I currently have - although there are a few things I'm close on (I still use Mozilla's etherpad but could easily switch if I can break my habit)

ocdtrekkie8• 10 years ago

I use Sandstorm daily. Effectively it replaces Google Drive/Docs for me. I use Etherpad, EtherCalc, and Text Editor a lot on it. And I use Davros for storing arbitrary files I want to share. My blog is hosted on Sandstorm tlo, but I've posted to it like four times so it doesn't really count.

skrowl• 10 years ago

How do you back up / replicate? How would you recover from your sandstorm instance failing?

WhatIsDukkha• 10 years ago

I use it daily for etherpad and ethercalc.

Lots of apps now that I need to explore and see where they fit for me.

Looking forward to kentonv <.< clearing the path for huginn

https://github.com/cantino/huginn/issues/839

That seems like a killer app when wrapped in the smooth awesome deploy of sandstorm.

kentonv13• 10 years ago

Huginn is tricky because it needs to talk to the outside world a lot and we need ways to let it do so securely[0]. But we're closing in on getting that done, and I can't wait to be able to port Huginn to show off how much more secure it will be running inside Sandstorm. :)

[0] https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/using/security-practices...

ndarilek• 10 years ago

I use Sandstorm daily. Private/company projects are run in Gitlab instances, though I may switch to Gitweb if a minor cosmetic issue is resolved (Gitweb in Sandstorm can only host one repo by design but you still have to click through to it when viewing the instance, which is mildly annoying when all other apps come up ready to use.) I have a bunch of Wekan boards managing everything from coding projects to my GTD buckets to separate boards for random home improvement projects. I prefer Wekan to spreadsheets because I can track work through arbitrary workflows and annotate items with additional data, and Sandstorm lets me manage that without having to maintain and secure a separate Wekan server that any random person could find and exploit. My blog is hosted in Sandstorm WordPress so I have the niceness of its admin interface but none of its security risks, and all the speed of a static site. A small 2-person bootstrapped startup I've cofounded uses it for many of the same use cases plus hosting our app's Piwik instance, again so there's literally no non-Sandstorm-secured user-facing attack surface other than Piwik's API endpoint. I have an idea for a platform co-op in the middle distant future, and if I manage to launch it then I'll run it via Sandstorm-hosted Loomio, which I'm actively attempting to port and am fairly close to completing.

Sandstorm is a great platform, and the community comprises some of the nicest, most dedicated folks I know. When my cofounder messed up our install a bit, Kenton talked us through fixing it on a weekend no less, right down to giving us database queries to run and then patching Sandstorm to handle our edge case the next week. Awesome people.

lambda• 10 years ago

Don't use it day to day; we use Google Docs at my company, so that's what I happen to use for most of that kind of stuff.

But one day Google Docs happened to be down while I was doing a phone screen using Google Docs as a whiteboard for the candidate, and I'd heard about Sandstorm's Etherpad, so I signed up, launched that, and shared it with the candidate. Was quick and easy and we were able to go on with the phone screen.

mrdomino_• 10 years ago

I've been hosting a Groove Basin instance on it for the last little while. Check it out, it's anarchist radio!

https://mrdomino.sandcats.io/shared/_NnFzbFzvci0JBgXw3hRwCWO...

At some point some crazy mofo is going to post it to hackernews. Hopefully I don't have to revoke the URL and clean up any spam and y'all just groove with the little community I've got going on there! But just in case, here's one where you can only listen, that might last a little longer:

https://mrdomino.sandcats.io/shared/kYJ-X75DzV3HTB0Ro6cTizCD...

I posted a URL for that station to my work's Slack, and then people started uploading stuff and rocking out. We've had a great time taking turns DJing, sharing our musical taste with each other, and hijacking the stream when it gets too boring or weird. I've had friends of mine jump on from elsewhere in the world, some who I haven't seen in years, and drop their music on us. We're completely in love with this -- it's a way for us to stay connected through music without disturbing the people who just want to work quietly.

I'm astounded at how easy Sandstorm made this whole thing. These guys continue to blow me away with their ability to create incredibly useful experiences on a small budget and in such a short time.

dikaiosune3• 10 years ago

I really like what Sandstorm is doing here, but the most attractive setup for me (self-hosted on a box I physically control) is hampered by the asynchronous up/down speeds of consumer internet. I already have a somewhat slow download (~15Mbps), but my upload is 10% of that, and I'm not fond of the idea of reducing all of my access speeds to my "cloud" data by 90% of what they currently are.

kentonv13• 10 years ago

FWIW, this is why I generally recommend running on a "cloud" provider like Digital Ocean rather than running physically in your own home. But of course that requires trusting the provider, which is a trade-off.

<vaporware>Once we have all our federation plans in place it will be easy to have multiple Sandstorm servers that connect to each other so that you can restrict critical secrets (say, your PGP key) to your home machine while putting less-critical stuff in "the cloud", but still have them all connect to each other (essentially: federated Powerbox).</vaporware>

dikaiosune3• 10 years ago

s/vaporware/shut_up_and_take_my_money/

EDIT: Also, yes, a DO box with Sandstorm is what I have some amorphous period of time this summer reserved for. Just not as ideal for me as physically controlling the box.

darklajid2• 10 years ago

My problem isn't speed (300 down, 20 up). It's ipv6 (only). Can't reach my services from the go, because no network, anywhere, runs ipv6.

None of my two mobile carriers. Not my employer's corporate network. No network at any of my friends. And I've yet to see a public hotspot that isn't ipv4 only. Everything ipv6 is dark when I leave the house.

So.. different cause, same problem. Hosting at home is a non-starter.

db48x3• 10 years ago

Consider using a VPN. Great for privacy on untrustworthy networks, and if you run it on your "own" vps you can add things like IPv6

static_noise2• 10 years ago

Privacy comes at a price. Maybe you could host at a friends place or rent a physical server.

If you think about asymmetric internet connections there are many reasons it is the way it is but few of them are good reasons. To contrast this, Google fiber offers symmetric connections with 1 GBit/s upload speed which could change the game for some lucky people.

But even with your current connection, if you mostly have low bandwidth content like text/notekeeping and small documents you should try it. There is no good reason to store private notes and documents in the cloud.

dikaiosune3• 10 years ago

Sure, privacy comes at a price, but projects like Sandstorm are (at least in part) aimed at reducing that price relative to the large-scale SaaS services. I've looked into a physical colo, but there isn't one in the town/city where I'm from and it'd be a minimum 2.5 hour drive to the closest site. Unfortunately re: hosting at a friend's house, a small-ish city like mine doesn't have anyone in it other than large businesses who have decent upload. And that's a big reason why I'm still on Gmail, Dropbox, Wunderlist, etc. -- the cost to self-host is just a little too high. For me, as attractive as I find the idea of proper privacy, the price is almost there but not quite low enough.

I look forward to a future where I have access to a symmetric fiber connection -- but that will require either a decade of development where I'm from or a move to a more metropolitan area (the latter is not out of the question, of course). In the meantime I have plans to evaluate a bunch of different self-hosted SaaS options on DigitalOcean in the next few months.

mmanfrin2• 10 years ago

I understand the usecase of having your own google doc-like services or a note taking device, but reading through the docs I got the picture that everything used would be behind the user wall; is there any way to expose apps from sandstorm as sort of standalone things? I.e., could I make 'forums.example.com', and the forums points to an install of nodebb, allowing for access/registration outside of sandstorm?

I like the idea of having a system where I can deploy instances of open source systems for me/friends to use on my own domain/server (like a small message board or something), but if it's entirely behind the being-a-user-of-the-sandstorm-instance first, then the utility is lessened.

paulproteus• 10 years ago

FWIW, one way Sandstorm addresses this is that anyone can sign in with their Google/GitHub/email if you give them a sharing link. So they don't have to have an account first.

e.g. try this:

https://mrdomino.sandcats.io/shared/bqY9H9opr0AnKa6XYtC1Obfu...

This is my friend's bulletin board on his own personal Sandstorm server (admittedly ugly URL - we need to make it possible to make less ugly, but you could work around that with a redirect elsewhere).

Visit it, and then sign in, and you're talking.

kentonv13• 10 years ago

You can freely share any app in Sandstorm with other users using the "share access" button. If you want an app to be "public", you can create a sharing link and post it publicly. (Note that anyone can log into your Sandstorm server, but unless you share with them there is nothing they can do when they log in.) We have a lot of plans to make the UX better here, but it basically works.

The experience does end up pretty different that traditional self-hosted apps, and not everyone will be happy with that, but there are some pretty big advantages to this approach. Users don't need to log into each app separately; instead, they log into Sandstorm once. Apps don't need to implement their own login systems, which means fewer opportunities for security bugs.

Most importantly, having the Sandstorm UI makes it feasible to manage lots of fine-grained app instances that are isolated from each other. Fine-grained containerization in turn has all kinds of advantages, in particular in terms of security. See:

https://sandstorm.io/how-it-works

ocdtrekkie8• 10 years ago

Out of curiosity, what would be the point of someone logging into NodeBB but not your Sandstorm hosting it? Sandstorm takes care of the authentication by design, so you can ensure your users are protected even if a bug is found in the app in question. That's a large part of the benefit of it.

There might be some sense in a way to present it without the sidebar to go to other apps or shared grains or some such, but I can't imagine you'd want to not authenticate users with Sandstorm in that scenario.

mmanfrin2• 10 years ago

For instance if they don't want to sign up, just view content; or in the case of the meteor digg-like app, requiring sign up before use is a major turn-off. Or if I am away from my own computer but want to show someone something on the bulletin board; I don't want to have to log in to the full system to get a link to view (or a link to share) when the alternative is a normal self-hosted app where I could go to forum.mydomain.com.

skybrian3• 10 years ago

I'm a fan but I haven't used it yet. I'm still a bit wary of either storing data I actually care about (originals) or serving a public website from either a self-hosted or startup-managed machine.

It would be nice to run Sandstorm apps that store their data and serve static websites from Github. Occasionally they go down, but on the whole I'm more confident that their hosting will be around for a long time.

Even longer term, backing up a grain to a git repo (not necessarily Github) would be pretty nice.

ocdtrekkie8• 10 years ago

Sandstorm's hosting service (Oasis) is hosted on a service arguably/probably more reliable than GitHub... Google Compute Engine.

The big difference between Sandstorm and say... GitHub hosting (if the code is written for their APIs), is no matter whether I self-host or use Oasis, I can easily move my data to a different storage medium later.

kentonv13• 10 years ago

Well... I am not going to claim that Oasis itself has better uptime than Github. :)

(Although we have had very few unexpected issues, we still need to take Oasis down briefly during updates. This is something I'm working on fixing, and until then I try my best to schedule updates when people are asleep...)

As to GP's concern about longevity of the service, the key point is that unlike any SaaS service, you can easily move your data off Oasis onto a self-hosted server running only open source software, and end up with exactly the same user experience you had before.

skybrian3• 10 years ago

Being able to do a git clone of a repo containing text files that I actually understand, with a full history, is very comforting.

I'm not sure a zip file containing binary files in some unknown format gives me that.

jlgaddis• 10 years ago

Looks nice and I'd love to try it out for my company -- hosted at first, then maybe on-premises if we like it.

There's no pricing details on /business, though, only a "Contact Us" link.

So I'll do what I do every time this happens: click "Close Tab" and move on.

(I don't want to talk to your -- or anybody else's -- sales people. Ever. I know I'm not alone either, so you're artificially limiting your user base if you do this.)

kentonv13• 10 years ago

Sorry!

This isn't because we want to force you to talk to sales people (we don't even have any sales people! just us techies here!). The problem is that Sandstorm+Business is still in development, so there's nothing self-service for us to offer you. We want people willing to contact us to do so so that we can get their requirements and keep them updated, but if you don't want to talk to us (understandable -- I'm the same way), then your best bet is to try out the "individual" version now (which actually works OK for companies, but doesn't yet have all the features listed on the /business page).

Within a couple months we'll ship this, and then you'll be able to get it set up without talking to anybody. In fact, we plan to make it all part of the same build, so if you install from https://sandstorm.io/install today then the features will appear over time...

(We're currently not actively working on a managed-hosting version of the "business" features. We'll probably do that someday, but on-prem is a big selling point so we're focusing on that for now. That said, many people use https://oasis.sandstorm.io for work purposes today.)

tw04• 10 years ago

Seriously, you should consider making that somehow part of the "contact us" link. Because even as someone not using the service, anytime I see "contact us" I get the same disgusting feeling in the pit of my stomach that you want me to contact you because you want to up-sell me.

At the very least, make it a link to "show pricing" and then on the next page give an explanation of like - if you need X, it should cost approximately X. Because we're still figuring things out, we may need to give you custom pricing (from the geeks, not a sales guy, we promise!). "Contact Us" has unfortunately become synonymous with shitty used-car negotiations.

fit2rule2• 10 years ago

I'm also one of those Tab-closers. My advice is, hit me with a real-life demo of these apps, in a video within 8 seconds minimum, or I gtfo, basically..

There is huge value in your offering. But there is also a massive investment required by users of these apps and .. eventually .. your services. You have to show me a demo full of real apps in use, with solid data ..

Beltiras• 10 years ago

You should actually make a "Pricing" page with some representation of this info. I remember seeing sandstorm.io sometime ago and dismissing it because I could not find a page showing me what it would cost. I might check it out now thou.

nl• 10 years ago

I think this is a great page: https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/using/security-non-event...

edtechdev• 10 years ago

"Sandstorm Security Non-events

This page contains a partial list of security issues that have not affected web apps when they run in Sandstorm -- typically because of the hardening we do to apps, or because of the hardening we do against the attack surface of the Linux kernel. The purpose is to demonstrate that our security practices provide some degree of useful protection in the face of real-world vulnerabilities."

bsbechtel• 10 years ago

I've kept an eye on Sandstorm for a while now...however, I get the feeling that it is something I should want to use, but I can't find the use case that warrants it. Can any of the developers here provide a little more context as to when or where it might be useful? Is this kind of like a super simple Docker competitor?

db48x3• 10 years ago

What's the state of the Powerbox? Is it available yet?

kentonv13• 10 years ago

Not quite, but here's a pull request:

https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/pull/1459

charlieok2• 10 years ago

If I could choose one app I'd love to see on sandstorm, I'd choose https://github.com/cantino/huginn

Or to generalize just a bit, any good app in the category of "automate all the things". With the recent demise of yahoo pipes, I'm not even sure there is a decent hosted service available in this category anymore, unless IFTTT meets your needs.

I think there's likely a lot of overlap between "people who want their own server" and "people who want to set up automations tying together their various devices and services".

I think Sandstorm sits in the sweet spot between "people who are not only professional engineers but also want to spend the time and effort to maintain a personal server" and "people who don't understand technology and/or will just use what their peers use". Power users, basically.

So yeah. Huginn :)

kentonv13• 10 years ago

I agree! We plan to port Huginn just as soon as we have the infrastructure in place so that it is able to request permission to talk to the various external servers that it wants to talk to -- which will be pretty soon now. :)

charlieok2• 10 years ago

That was exactly the question I wanted to ask about sandstorm's capabilities. Glad to read this :)

Sandstorm App update: New open-source self-hostable apps

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