Sandstorm – An open source platform for personal servers

by reinhardt1053 • 11 years ago

509 184 11 years ago

The web site says apps cant perform psych experiments, and links to the contentious facebook emotion split test. I'm pretty sure you'll be able to do split testing on these apps...

That small criticism aside, I'm very curious how developing for sandstorm would be different from from developing for a typical host. Anyone know the major differences?

swsieber2• 11 years ago

One major thing that I can think of off the top of my head is that they provide the login and authentication for you and you just plug into it. They also have a sharing system in place that I think you can easily plug into.

pmontra• 11 years ago

I see that many old and new web applications run inside sandstorm, so it's a framework to manage apps. They probably have to be adapted a little but I don't think that WordPress has been rewritten to fit into sandstorm. Anything will do, probably.

Furthermore you can download sandstorm and install it on your server.

rdrey2• 11 years ago

Sure, you could write an app that does A/B testing, but the whole idea is that people will use Sandstorm to run _personal_ servers/apps. And A/B testing your own reaction to an app doesn't make much sense.

Runtime permissions of these apps will be easy to control, so the Sandstorm platform will prevent apps from phoning home without your permission.

jorjordandan5• 11 years ago

Again thanks! But using Facebook was still a poorly chosen example of what their apps won't do, since they aren't aiming for hosting large customer facing apps like a social network. Perhaps that is what contributed to my confusion in the first place. Now I have a better understanding of what it's for.

swsieber2• 11 years ago

Ah, but you could write an A/B testing page and then share it easily with your friends - part of the value proposition is 1) hosting your personal apps and 2) fine-grained sharing of it with others. So it wouldn't be a huge sampling, just your friends.

kentonv37• 11 years ago

Once our sandbox is complete, apps will not be able to "phone home" unless the user grants permission, so users will need to opt into any experiments.

Currently there are two reasons this isn't true yet:

* We haven't implemented client-side sandboxing yet. It's not incredibly hard (content-security-policy header, some tweaking of apps), but hasn't hit the top of the priority queue.

* The server sandbox currently has some intentionally-poked holes allowing apps to do things like pull RSS feeds from the internet. We plan to close these once the Powerbox UI is implemented, which is the main permission-granting interface, but that's a major project and we wanted to get some useful apps working in the meantime.

tomjen32• 11 years ago

Couldn't you do an AB test by having the code choose a random number on install (or first write to the datastore) and have it leak the results by loading an image or iframe with a special url/query parameter?

MayanAstronaut• 11 years ago

Looks great but memory usage is ambiguous. What if I load a data structure to over the 1gb allocation?

If I need to load a 1.2gb dictionary the whole thing topple?

kentonv37• 11 years ago

There is no 1GB limit. I think you might be confused about compute units? Compute units are just a measure of RAM usage over time -- a compute unit is 1GB of RAM used for one hour. An app can use more than 1GB of RAM; it will just consume compute units faster. E.g. an app using 2GB will consume a compute unit in 30 minutes.

This all relates to our upcoming managed hosting. Self-hosted installs are not metered since it's your own hardware.

https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-14-compute-units.html

jorjordandan5• 11 years ago

Would a sandstorm app prevent you from using say, Google analytics or new relic without getting a users permission?

rdrey2• 11 years ago

I don't think Sandstorm wants to be a platform on which you host your large user-facing app. Instead it wants to be the platform on which you can install your personal wiki, ipython notebooks, your streaming media library, etc.

You as the owner of the Sandstorm instance will control whether the apps on your instance can send data to Google for Google Analytics, for example.

If you invite someone else to use an app on your Sandstorm instance, they will trust _you_ with their data and you can decide whether the apps on your instance share the data with Google or not.

jorjordandan5• 11 years ago

Ah, that makes much more sense now! I think they need to figure out a better way to spell out their value proposition.

SimplyUseless• 11 years ago

On their github page, it still shows a warning about not using it for mission critical applications.

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

ocdtrekkie8• 11 years ago

Well, it's kinda an Alpha. Goes without saying, doesn't it?

rdtsc• 11 years ago

Btw the main developer, Kenton Varda, is also the author of Cap-n-Proto -- a pretty neat serialization & RPC format.

https://capnproto.org/

I was playing with that and stumbled on Sandstorm a while back.

swah• 11 years ago

He likes LAN parties: http://kentonsprojects.blogspot.com/2011/12/lan-party-optimi...

vtempest• 11 years ago

I was there! Small world. I would definitely use sandstorm if I wasn't an IT guy.

green7ea• 11 years ago

Cap-n-Proto is awesome in so many ways. I'm trying sandstorm just for that.

polynomial• 11 years ago

This looks incredibly useful for things we're currently trying to make Docker do. Huge potential here.

S4M• 11 years ago

Can you give examples?

qiqing4• 11 years ago

Hey polynomial, I'd love to learn more about your use case. Drop me a line at jade at sandstorm?

3zzy• 11 years ago

As a designer, the website gave me an 'aha- moment, nicely done! :)

ozh• 11 years ago

Sounds cool but I think the WordPress implementation is TERRIBLE: it depends on a WordPress fork that is completely outdated, instead of downloading an up-to-date fresh archive.

paulproteus5• 11 years ago

I agree -- the current WordPress package needs work. Thank you for trying it and looking into it!

Community-wise, one thing we're going to need, as Sandstorm grows, is an ecosystem of app package maintainers. Part of what we're hoping is that more developers of the apps themselves will maintain the Sandstorm ports, like Audrey Tang is maintaining the EtherCalc port.

Tech-wise, one thing we're going to need is a solid story for how Sandstorm packages will easily stay up to date with the latest changes as the upstream author releases new updates.

I work on+for Sandstorm, and I'm also a Debian developer. Debian is not a shining example with regard to either of the above, and I'm sure we can do even better at Sandstorm.

tokenizerrr• 11 years ago

Is it possible to run arbitrary Docker containers? If so, that could be a solution.

leonardinius• 11 years ago

It's the case of me scrolling the site and reading most of the GH readme - and still getting almost no idea what status it is, what is the goal/vision and how I might use it..

"We do LXC stuff in secure and user friendly way" is the message?

paulproteus5• 11 years ago

Here's my own summary, which if you like it, I can try harder to make sure becomes more prominent somewhere:

Sandstorm is a way to run web apps as containers, gloriously sandboxed from each other, and moreover a web interface to install them easily and allow the user to create multiple instances of a web app easily.

It intends to grow features relating to sharing instances -- so that an instance of a web app is as easy to share with someone else as a Google Docs link -- and grow features relating to supporting more network protocols -- so that apps can safely communicate with the outside world, mediated by the person using Sandstorm.

Right now, the target audience is people who like running web apps like WordPress or Ethercalc on their own server. In the future, the target audience will grow to include companies whose IT departments want to enable users to install web apps safely without asking IT first -- they'll know it's safe due to the glorious sandboxing.

jorjordandan5• 11 years ago

How is glorious sandboxing different from regular sandboxing? Is there a 'glorious' certification?

Just kidding - looks pretty awesome!!

kentonv37• 11 years ago

Did you get a chance to try the demo?

It was pretty overloaded earlier, but is in better shape now.

https://demo.sandstorm.io

amirmc2• 11 years ago

Things like Sandstorm are really important as they allow people options without becoming a full-blown sysadmin. Just look at how many crowd funding ideas are based on 'personal cloud' concepts.

However, we also need to work on the fundamental problems to make it easier to build decentralised products in the first place (not everything is a web-app). Namely, how such apps are built, how they store/sync data, and how we deal with identity. The current tools simply aren't designed for the world we're heading towards, so we need to re-evaluate our assumptions. On top of this is the need for business models that don't rely on mass data collection (eg advertising) -- we can't rely on everything being open source but the underlying infrastructure must be.

There are many ways forward and the particular approach I'm taking is based on unikernels and creating a modern stack to deal with the above issues directly. There's more info at http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/

If anyone happens to be at FOSDEM this weekend I'd be happy to chat about these ideas in person.

jackweirdy• 11 years ago

Will you be talking about Mirage/other bits of your work at FOSDEM, or are you “just” attending?

amirmc2• 11 years ago

Not speaking but doing a demo at the Xen booth on Saturday (likely 1pm-3pm but email me to be sure).

The repo has details about the demo if you're interested (though it's probably also a spoiler) https://github.com/amirmc/fosdemo

paulproteus5• 11 years ago

I'm at FOSDEM! I'm on #fosdem and #sandstorm on freenode -- my nick is paulproteus. Also I work on+for Sandstorm.

mempko• 11 years ago

I love the idea of unikernels! I took a much high level approach for p2p apps with Fire★ (http://firestr.com). Where it is GUI centric and has a built in app editor (all application code is viewable/editable).

My only concern with the unikernel approach is that you can end up with a system where the code is not viewable and editable.

Have you thought about that concern?

lewisl90293• 11 years ago

In terms of storage, here's something I've been working with for one of my current projects:

http://remotestorage.io/

Open protocol for synchronized personal storage. It uses a decentralized model where users provide and pay for their own storage. Could be game-changing if it takes off.

nileshtrivedi• 11 years ago

There is also https://tent.io/ It seemed quite promising to me but there haven't been updates from the team lately.

kentonv37• 11 years ago

remoteStorage is an elegant solution in a lot of ways, but there are some problems:

* Apps written in this style have a very hard time being real-time collaborative. Maybe this will be solved by WebRTC, but it's a lot easier with a server component. (Sandstorm has several real-time collaborative apps, like EtherPad, EtherCalc, and Wave. Currently you can share these apps with other users by copy/pasting the URL; the sharing model will get more sophisticated eventually).

* You need to set up a storage server for the apps to use, or use one of the big providers that like to do data mining. You then need to connect the app to the correct server, which is extra busy-work.

* The permission model of these storage servers isn't terribly sophisticated. Often you'll end up granting the app broader permissions that you really want.

* There is, of course, nothing stopping the app from storing data to other places as well, nor is there any isolation between separate documents opened by the same app. (On Sandstorm, each document is a separate instance of the app in a separate sandbox which cannot communicate with the outside world without permission.)

Edit: Missed that you said you're working on RemoteStorage. Probably would have phrased differently if I noticed. Wasn't meant to be an attack. Sorry! (We actually like remoteStorage apps a lot in that they are often easily ported to Sandstorm. :) )

edwintorok• 11 years ago

I've quickly read through your RFC, and since I've recently added support for Content-Range to LibreS3[0] that is the first thing I looked for, and sure enough you support it.

Although it is not clear to me why you need to use webfinger to announce Content-Range support. There is Accept-Ranges header, or you can detect that you get a 200 instead of a 206 reply on a Range request for GET.

For PUT RFC7233 says "A server MUST ignore a Range header field received with a request method other than GET." so I'm not sure how that would work there, can you give an example?

[0] http://blog.skylable.com/2015/01/build-your-own-cdn-with-sky...

wyldfire• 11 years ago

I think Storj may have some similarities.

http://storj.io/

greggman2• 11 years ago

I know this is going to sound ridiculous and maybe this is the wrong topic. I'm at a spot where I wish there was a closer to turn key framework for my project.

I wrote 3 interdependent web servers, have them running on all the same virtual machine on digital ocean with varnish. Now I need to upgrade ubuntu and I don't want them to go down. So, apparently I need at least 3 machines if not more. One to run varnish or something similar, to direct to the other 2. Some way to bleed people over to one of the 2 machines. Once everyone is on one machine I can upgrade the unused machine. After that I can bleed them all back and then upgrade the other.

Is this too small a niche? Is the answer I should have used "google cloud"? It just seems like each step is so much work. I certainly learned a lot (vagrant, ansible, and other stuff) although all of that knowledge will be probably obsolete before I need to do this again.

Is there something I should have looked at? Sandstorm seems one level down. Like it's more like a replacement for the old lamp/cpanel isps.

e12e3• 11 years ago

In your scenario, you need "just" two machines - and really only one running most of the time. You have varnish+appservers running one one vm now. What you need is one more vm, running the same stack. Depending on how you handle sessions this could be as easy as:

    0: reduce ttl of dns to ~60s
    1: bring up vm2==vm1
    2: upgrade vm2
    2.1: test vm2
    2.2: shutdown vm2, take DO snapshot
    2.3: instanciate vm/droplet of vm2
    3: point/change dns from vm1 to vm2
    4: wait for traffic to die on vm1
    5: shutdown vm1
    6: possibly increase ttl in dns again

Next round, same procedure. This is not ready for HA -- easiest way there is running 2 vms like now, but with haproxy in front (so the vm has ha-varnish-3appservers), along with heart-beat and a shared ip. I don't thing DO supports that -- and it is probably not worth the hassle if you can live with dns changeover-time==downtime (say, minutes modulus wrongly configured dns caches).

With a couple of dedicated ips, you can usually get away with vm2 taking vm1s ip (and vice-versa) -- but again that depends on your session set-up and/or if dropping sessions are ok. With sessions in some kind of replicated cache/db (eg: redis, mysql) -- you could probably set vm2 to slave over/replicate sessions, then do the dns [ed: or ip] switch[over].

mixmastamyk• 11 years ago

Heroku might be an option (in the future).

olalonde• 11 years ago

I'm using Docker + Fig. The nice thing is that you can exactly replicate your production environment on your local machine and the Dockerfile syntax is really simple. The not so nice thing is that there's no "simple" way to run docker containers on multiple physical/virtual machines right now (that should become easier once Docker team releases their cluster solution). It would be nice to have a fig registry where people can publish complete Docker based systems (e.g. varnish + nginx + Node.js server) but I don't think there is such thing available at the moment. I wrote a bit about that idea here: http://syskall.com/crazy-and-not-so-crazy-startup-ideas-2015...

Also, I asked a similar question on HN one month ago and got some interesting replies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8805952

dominotw• 11 years ago

The logo is very cute. I love it.

qiqing4• 11 years ago

Thanks! h/t to Néna Nguyễn :)

idiotclock• 11 years ago

Would this also work for a GNU Social or pump.io service? Or diaspora?

ocdtrekkie8• 11 years ago

One of the Sandstorm devs is already working on porting Diaspora. pump.io has been mentioned as a possible thing to port.

CalRobert6• 11 years ago

This is exactly what needs to exist. I recently set up Ghost, Owncloud, and Gitlab on a personal server (odroid U3) that sits under my couch at home, and it's really rewarding to own the hardware which is my "cloud". However, it should be easier, and possible for anyone. Good for you guys.

maninalift• 11 years ago

ghost what?

iamdave• 11 years ago

http://ghost.org - it's a markdown based blog engine that gets out of your way and lets you focus on writing.

I run it for my blog and love it. There are a few features that I'd really like to have, but I get around them by editing locally.

ocdtrekkie8• 11 years ago

Ghost is a blogging platform! https://ghost.org/

teh_klev• 11 years ago

This probably:

https://ghost.org/

CalRobert6• 11 years ago

Below commenters are correct - the blog platform.

e12e3• 11 years ago

Incidentally, running containers is probably a great way to "install" the ghost libc vulnerability[1] (assuming you're basing off of base-images made before the bug was patched, and you haven't updated your containers/images).

I'm not sure neither vagrant nor docker have this really fixed -- that is: easily patching the base system/image (and still be confident that the app keeps running).

Is there an easy way to update a container based off of a (possibly few generations remote) base-image? Eg: You've pulled down a bare-bones, official CoreOS/Ubuntu/Debian/RedHat image from docker -- set it up for your use-case (say made a base image with your own CA-cert bundled, wired it up for kerberos/ldap/AD, maybe set up a trusted ssh-server ca-cert) -- then made a handful of images based off that: db, cache, and web-app.

Is there an easy way to patch the base image and all descendants? I assume all state should be in other volumes, so maybe this is easier than I think?

At any rate, it is something to keep in mind -- that grabbing images are great, but updates are still needed!

As other mention, the ghost refereed to by gp, is a blogging platform.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8953545

hbbio• 11 years ago

Did you use the Docker images?

I set up a Gitlab using Docker recently, and it was super easy to deploy (using https://github.com/sameersbn/docker-gitlab). On a side note, we also package our own app as Docker containers (https://github.com/MLstate/PEPS).

CalRobert6• 11 years ago

I didn't, embarrassingly because I've never used Docker and didn't feel like learning another tool while I set all this up. I need to though.

sarciszewski• 11 years ago

Contributors: Jasvir Nagra <img src=x onerror=alert()>

Nice try :)

kentonv37• 11 years ago

I love that Jas (being on the Google security team) just instinctively XSS's any form he fills out, and I love that our code just leaves his tag there, properly escaped, for all to see.

debacle• 11 years ago

I don't understand what this is. Can someone explain? What the hell does "This is the only way to make Open Source web apps viable." mean?

ocdtrekkie8• 11 years ago

The primary idea being that open source web apps can be used without having to be a server admin. Non-technical users can install apps on a Sandstorm server as easily as installing apps on their phone.

cben• 11 years ago

More details: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-ap... The central point (IMO) was economical: self-hosting frees developer from expenses. Trivial installation is just a pre-requisite for self-hosting to be acceptable.

mmccaff• 11 years ago

The web page is beautiful.

It might help to emphasize where this sits between installing Docker images from the repo, and using something like Webuzo or Softaculous to install popular web apps.

j_s• 11 years ago

The easiest way to get your own LibreBoard while they straighten out their DMCA from Trello! :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8936701

daemonk• 11 years ago

Is this like a cloud docker?

qiqing4• 11 years ago

We use the same Linux kernel features that Docker uses, but we use them directly. Here's a deeper explanation:

https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker...

iamwil2• 11 years ago

How do you get individually installed apps to selectively share data with other installations? I imagine something like diaspora tried solving this problem. Is there a general solution for any app?

kentonv37• 11 years ago

This is something we're still building (Sandstorm is still in alpha), but what we have in mind we call the Powerbox.

The idea is that one app can say to the system "I implement such and such protocol at such and such endpoint". Later on, some other app can say "I need something implementing such and such protocol". The system itself displays a picker, showing the user all of their other apps that may satisfy the requirement. When the user makes a choice, the requesting app is told how to contact the providing app and is implicitly given permission to do so, whereas prior to the exchange the apps had no ability to talk to each other. The user can inspect these connections later and potentially revoke them.

This is a whole lot easier for the user than going to the providing app and editing an ACL, then going to the requesting app and giving it an endpoint address, etc.

The way this is implemented under the hood is in terms of Cap'n Proto capability-based RPC. Blog post on that:

https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-12-15-capnproto-0.5.html

iamwil2• 11 years ago

That's pretty neat it's like the android intent system.

How does the system get the list of all other apps that satisfy the requirement? I'm guessing all apps register with sandstorm server somewhere that has a centralized list of other servers?

It'd be neat to have standard protocols, in the same way we have standard media types.

falcolas4• 11 years ago

I'm a DevOps developer, so keep that in mind as you read below.

Sandstorm looks insecure and inefficient, but that probably won't matter.

The ease of use for the end user trumps all. Users will love this, but I'm not looking forwarding to having to administer boxes running Sandstorm, though.

I imagine there will be a fair bit of work from my end to re-building apps so they can take advantage of tuned settings, shared services, caches, and the like. Plus figuring out a way to automate the usual securing, managing, monitoring, and cleanup around the Sandstorm environment.

Identifying bottlenecks will be fun too, though my first instinct will probably be to look at the Cap'n'Protocol bridge which Sandstorm runs everything through.

jerf2• 11 years ago

"Sandstorm looks insecure and inefficient, but that probably won't matter."

You may need to expand on that. It is not clear that you know what they're doing with sandboxing, etc. If you are, then I'm definitely interested in your further criticism, if this was a knee-jerk response I think it's unjustified.

"I imagine there will be a fair bit of work from my end to re-building apps so they can take advantage of tuned settings, shared services, caches, and the like."

Are you building apps that you expect people to deploy to their personal servers on a routine basis? For normal DevOps folks working inside of a corporation, Sandstorm is a complete non-event. It's not targeted at any part of your pipeline. The fact you're asking about bottlenecks makes me wonder a bit if you understand where this is targeted, too; frankly Sandstorm could slow everything it runs down by a factor of 10 and I wouldn't notice. My VPS that I would run sandstorm on is 99.9% idle anyhow, if not 99.99%.

falcolas4• 11 years ago

I addressed the security concern in a response to kentonv, please feel free to comment more on that one.

Sandstorm is a complete non-event.

I am speaking from the point of view of someone who may be asked to run and manage Sandstorm servers. Either as a service to sell, or as a service for internal customers. This is a very different use case than using it for just myself.

And if I'm honest, this isn't something I'd need to or want to run for myself. I'm comfortable with managing shared services and propping up web frontends. So no, I am not the targeted user of this software; however, I am the one who gets to write tools and processes to support those targeted users at some point in the future.

ohyeshedid4• 11 years ago

You really should follow what your fellows are saying, your claims of this being a complete non-event for DevOps contradict their claims of building out cluster management to help DevOps, or the future target audience being IT departments.

"The fact you're asking about bottlenecks makes me wonder a bit if you understand where this is targeted, too"

If your own team can't seem to understand where this is targeted, how would anyone else?

kentonv37• 11 years ago

Sandstorm looks insecure

As the lead developer, I emphatically disagree with this. :)

If you'd like to state why you think it's insecure, I'd love to hear it, but security is incredibly important to us and something we've put lots of effort into. I don't deny that there may be bugs (it's an alpha), but by design Sandstorm is a highly secure way to run other people's code.

and inefficient

While it's true that running lots of small per-user (or per-document) instances of apps is necessarily less efficient than running one large multi-tenant server, it's not nearly as bad as it sounds. Instances of the same app share their code an assets (read-only) and are aggressively shut down when not in use, which makes up the vast majority of the inefficiency. Meanwhile, infrastructure continues to get cheaper...

falcolas4• 11 years ago

If you'd like to state why you think it's insecure, I'd love to hear it

The long-term security of Linux containers has not been well explored yet. There have been exploits against the Kernel found, and there are likely to be more.

Plus, how much effort has gone into hardening the Cap'n'Protocol bridge? Do you have a security expert reviewing the code and looking for vulnerabilities? If so, great! I take that part back wholeheartedly.

I appreciate that you've worked past the Docker failing of not signing and validating files; this is a huge step in the right direction.

Instances of the same app share their code an assets (read-only)

But not their in-memory caches. Code and shared make up a fraction of their presence in memory.

infrastructure continues to get cheaper

This has always sounded like a lazy cop-out to me. Yes, infrastructure is getting cheaper, but our applications are getting bloated at the same rate. And if we're running potentially dozens of PostgreSQL instances on a single machine, your infrastructure costs to make all of the apps performant are not going to be cheap.

themoonbus7• 11 years ago

Here is how to write a landing page.

Big letters: "Sandstorm makes it easier to do XYZ" or "Sandstorm lets you do XYZ by doing XYZ"

E.g. "Sandstorm lets you run your own personal web applications without needing a background in IT!"

or "Sandstorm lets you to install personal web apps as easily as you install mobile apps!"

3 examples of what this could actually mean for 80% of your users "Run your own Dropbox!" "Host your own WordPress Blog!" "Get a mailbox to match your personalized email address!"

THEN drill down into what it actually is (Sandstorm is a open source platform that makes it easier to run and manage your own personal server, yadda yadda), and its more specific features, such as usability, security, etc.

(This advice operates under the assumption that "individuals" are your main target audience.)

qiqing4• 11 years ago

Thanks for your feedback!

larrybud• 11 years ago

+1 I went to Sandstorm's home page, and spent the first 5 minutes trying to figure out what it is & what it does.

"Sandstorm is an open source platform for personal servers". Ok, fine, but what is it REALLY? What does it do? Why is it better than (hosting / VPS hosting / AWS / Docker / PaaS)? Give me some examples of what I can do with it.

Sorry, you lost me with your home page.

roadnottaken• 11 years ago

I had the same experience. Still don't get it.

CalRobert6• 11 years ago

It's better because the internet was supposed to be a bunch of computers talking to each other. It was a beautiful vision. Instead, it's been centralized on two levels:

FB/Google/Instagram etc. serving content, and AWS/DigitalOcean owning the hardware for those intrepid individuals who want to roll their own solutions.

The internet wasn't supposed to be Amazon, Google, and Facebook all talking to each other. It's scary that ISP's don't even want you to host your own (modest) server. It's SUPPOSED to be a bunch of computers networked together! Sandstorm makes it easier to live that vision where you own the hardware, or at LEAST have full control over your cloud. It doesn't necessarily need to be your home computer - a colo'ed odroid (or RPi if your needs are modest) would do the trick too. As more and more of the internet is gobbled up by VPS services I think it's important that the average Jane or Joe can still put together their own website, blog, game server, etc. and not be reliant on a company for it.

coldpie• 11 years ago

Good ideas, but make sure you hire a copy editor! "Let's" is short for "let us", like "let's go to the store." "Lets" is a conjugation of "to let" (i.e. to enable) like "Sandstorm lets you do XYZ."

themoonbus7• 11 years ago

Oops, fixed. Yes, don't take copy directly from a hastily written Hacker News post :)

sinatra• 11 years ago

Great suggestions! I'd say "Sandstorm lets you install server apps as easily as you install mobile apps!"

themoonbus7• 11 years ago

Yes, I definitely think something along those lines, especially if you're targeting a group of people who are somewhat tech savvy, but not tech savvy enough to run their own server.

taivare• 11 years ago

and for the ad campaign.." your Server will be with you "

resu• 11 years ago

If anything, the call for action ("Try the demo" button) should be made MUCH more noticeable.

I was thinking the same thoughts as you because who wants to try the half-assed barely functional demos that most sites put up?

Well, I decided to give the demo a try anyway, and damn am I impressed.

Almost didn't click it though. So hey, make it pop!

api• 11 years ago

I've been following this for a while and really like it. Have yet to try an install but probably will once it's more mature.

Dumb question: why not build on and leverage Docker? I'm sure you have an answer. I'm just curious.

kentonv37• 11 years ago

Indeed, we have a whole blog post about that. :)

https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker...

kornakiewicz2• 11 years ago

What's make me curious - do you plan enable option for selling apps? As a developer I would be more than happy to allow user install my app, but since I am not charity I would like to earn some money on it as well.

kentonv37• 11 years ago

Yes, we'll have an app store much like iPhone/Android. Open source apps will have the option of using a "pay what you want" model, but we'll also allow proprietary apps with fixed prices and maybe even subscription-based.

kornakiewicz2• 11 years ago

Great to read. Fingers crossed for the project.

bovermyer2• 11 years ago

This is actually pretty fantastic. I loved how quickly I could get an app up and running.

I assume that the paid version has a better app search/browse experience? The demo list, while cool, was pretty long and uncategorized.

kentonv37• 11 years ago

Yeah the demo "app list" is just a placeholder. We're working on an "app store" with self-service uploads, searchability, paid apps, pay-what-you-want for open source apps, etc. Once it is ready it will be available to everyone, whether you use self-hosting or managed.

bovermyer2• 11 years ago

I appreciate this very, very much. You have my attention.

alinspired• 11 years ago

on the first glance it's similar cpanel or plesk, but opensource, will take a look!

seagreen3• 11 years ago

Does anybody have any thoughts on the differences between Sandstorm, Camlistore, and Tent?

It seems there are a number of problems here. We need:

1. Better data stores 2. Better server environments 3. Better ways to share data with others

I wonder if Camlistore's approach might not be the cleanest, since it doesn't try to bundle (1) and (2) together.

EDIT: Not to get too sappy, but any of these would be _fantastic_ compared to our current Web 2.0 disaster, and I'm glad Sandstorm is picking up steam.

kentonv37• 11 years ago

Camlistore and Tent are both complimentary to Sandstorm. Sandstorm gives you a way to run apps easily, Camlistore is a structured storage system which other apps could connect to, and Tent is a federation protocol that apps could use to talk to each other. I'd like to see this all converge at some point. :)

seagreen3• 11 years ago

That's awesome news.

I'm suspicious there's too much overlap between Camlistore and Tent for them to both be useful, since they each do data storage and sharing, but that's not your problem:)

alfg• 11 years ago

Very cool project. I've played around with this same idea, but as a CLI package manager, rather than a webapp.

I think it would be cool to have custom VPS image, where you can install webapps to it from the CLI out of the box easily. Sort of like homebrew, but for your personal servers.

Congrats!

gregimba• 11 years ago

This isn't really anything to write home about.

69_years_and• 11 years ago

Sandstorm - this is wickedly cool, tried the demo and it worked great, can't understand all the 'do this, do that' comments. As someone who is just learning to play with docker - just finished dockerizing all my vps apps so the first thing I think of is there a Dockerfile to build this or a docker image - off to have a look for one. Awesome stuff - like the collection of apps you have ready to go. Maybe you have fixed the landing web page in the meantime but I had no trouble understanding what you are about. 100.times upvote.

kentonv37• 11 years ago

Thanks!

davidjgraph• 11 years ago

There's a lot of focus of how sandstorm allows you to run web applications easily without having to setup the back-end that they need without SS.

There is an additional edge case, that's of web applications that don't have a back-end at all, ours falls into that category. Our web app is a by-product of two of our commercial products, but we don't actually have user management, storage, etc.

Online we integrate with Google Drive and Dropbox, but you can't create an account with us and store your data with us. Sandstorm allow people to deploy our web app, whereas you can't at all, previously. It saves us months of work creating and maintaining the functionality it provides.

e12e3• 11 years ago

First(?) discussion on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7460828

After about a year -- how tied up is sandstorm to meteor? I confess I have issues with the our-way-or-the-highway nature of meteor (our js, our db, our app-server) -- even if I can see that it does appear to give some pretty nice benefits for rapid prototyping.

I'd love to see sandstorm as a handful of small tools with various uis on top: command line, web, etc. Seems like it should be possible to do with (on the extreme end) go and and a berkley/sqlite db+file system for images?

kentonv37• 11 years ago

Sandstorm's front-end UI is built on Meteor, but this doesn't affect apps -- they can be written using any stack. We have apps written in Meteor, Express, Rails, PHP, Python, C++, and Rust.

Meteor is actually amazingly modular if you look under the hood. We use it in a fairly default configuration, but it's easy for me to see how I would go about using a different database or a different templating language. Those people write high-quality code.

Eventually I would like to ditch Mongo and instead have Meteor speaking Cap'n Proto RPC to a Cap'n Proto database. I don't expect that I'll have much trouble getting Meteor to do this.

I'd love to see sandstorm as a handful of small tools with various uis on top: command line, web, etc.

Hmm, not sure I understand what you're suggesting. Sandstorm is all about UI and running web apps, so it seems to me that a "command-line interface to Sandstorm" would really be a whole different project. :)

shric• 11 years ago

What's the name of the song?

iagooar• 11 years ago

I thought that too, but was afraid to post it fearing the negative votes ;)

cyberrodent• 11 years ago

From https://demo.sandstorm.io/demo : "We only have one machine. It may get slow or crashy under excessive load."

kentonv37• 11 years ago

And indeed, when we were #1 on HN yesterday morning with hundreds of apps running concurrently, it got a bit slow and crashy. :) But things cleared up after the traffic died down a bit.

Our upcoming managed hosting service will, of course, use multiple machines with automagic scaling.

JimXugle• 11 years ago

There's also YunoHost, a project with similar goals. I've played around with it, but it seems to be beta quality. https://yunohost.org

Hello71• 11 years ago

No protection from getting your job done: Security can often be a hassle, getting in the way of your work. Sandstorm is different. When you tell a Sandstorm app to talk to some other app, or to talk to the internet, Sandstorm sees your intent and automatically grants it access. So, you are never interrupted by a prompt asking "Do you want to allow this app to the thing you just told it to do?" And yet, the apps only get the permissions you actually wanted them to have.

So... the program is psychic?

RaleyField• 11 years ago

So... the program is psychic?

No, it's just based on DOS.

jmsdnns• 11 years ago

I really appreciate the humor in Cap'n Proto. That makes the dev team seem like a fun group to hang with.

nodejsisbest• 11 years ago

Darude Sandstorm is going to conflict with this projects name a bit?

bmoresbest55• 11 years ago

I am not really sure why this is so exciting to everyone. I have seen a couple comments asking what this software does, explicitly. I will admit I like the idea of personal servers but I am not sure how to apply this potential amazing software to my life. Suggestions?

netsurfer912• 11 years ago

Darude - Sandstorm

(sorry)

relaxitup• 11 years ago

kentonv, any chance of getting a nice extended (eg, support for more than just text; file formats like images etc as well) (or even just regular) pastebin app added to Sandstorm? Perhaps something like bepasty ( https://github.com/bepasty/bepasty-server ) or Hosty ( https://bitbucket.org/xrstf/hosty ).

ocdtrekkie8• 11 years ago

That sort of thing is definitely well in the scope of apps that'd be good to port to Sandstorm. There's a lot of basic apps the platform still needs.

Bepasty in particular sounds like a really neat potential app that can just provide "file containers".

kentonv37• 11 years ago

Absolutely, if you port it! ;) https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Porting-Guide

Or nominate it to our app committee, who votes on apps to port: https://sandstorm.io/vote

(The app committee is 32 people who purchased seats during our Indiegogo campaign.)

Sandstorm – An open source platform for personal servers

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