Show HN: Cloudron – Get Your Own Cloud

https://www.cloudron.io/?showhn

by nebulon • 11 years ago

64 39 11 years ago

nebulon13• 11 years ago

Hi everyone, co-founder here. We are now in developer beta. Please request an invite if you would like to develop Cloudron apps. https://www.cloudron.io/documentation.html

nivertech• 11 years ago

How Cloudron differs from the following projects?

- http://cozy.io/en/

- https://sandstorm.io/

- http://www.cloudstead.io/

nebulon13• 11 years ago

From what I understand cozy.io and cloudstead.io are focusing on specific services around personal information, like owncloud. Our architecture allows installing arbitrary apps like owncloud as an app. Cozy.io and cloudstead.io would not have gogs or gitlab as apps.

Sandstorm and us are trying to solve very similar issues, but the approach and architecture is different.

kilimchoi• 11 years ago

Looks good!

Great Job!

zodPod• 11 years ago

What are you guys looking at price-wise for these tiers? Kind of annoying that you don't even attempt to list them.

nebulon13• 11 years ago

Hi, sorry for not listing them yet. We are currently not able to provide any numbers, as we are figuring out how much resources the various models will need.

condescendence3• 11 years ago

Site looks great, the video down the bottom has a pricing model in it, and the sites does not. From the looks of it, the price model in the video was just set for development reasons because it's listing at $0.2/month.

I would fix this, you don't want to give people any wrong ideas about your price model if you haven't finalized it yet.

The software and setup ease, from what I'm able to read, seems pretty nifty. There's a good product here just be careful not to sell yourself short.

From a product identification point of view, I think it would be good for you to list the specifications (at least hard drive space for example) of the VPS you're using in the backend. It would only make sense especially for some of the apps you want to provide such as OwnCloud which is basically to stores files and such.

These were just some thoughts from a first look at the site, take them with a grain of salt.

nebulon13• 11 years ago

Thanks for hint, the video was taken by me from a developer build. We have not yet figured out the pricing model.

condescendence3• 11 years ago

If you'd like some instant feedback, or a test user to help with dev feel free to shoot me an email:

james -at- royalholdings.net

nickpsecurity5• 11 years ago

Rule of thumb: mutually distrusting users sharing physical resources typically creates vulnerabilities. Do everything right and you still have covert channels. So long as they use physical separation rather than virtual then I'm excited to see this development. Separation that's (a) physically isolated per customer and (b) behind a stable interface allow the specifics of the security to constantly improve without work on the customer's end while blocking risks that come with virtualization.

See the co-founder in the comments. nebulon, would you clarify if it's physical and how do the boxes interface at the networking layer? That would be a start on upper-bounds of security.

nebulon13• 11 years ago

We do not run physical servers and have only virtual separation between users. Thanks for the input, we will work to clarify that. Please see https://www.cloudron.io/faq.html

nickpsecurity5• 11 years ago

So it's basically still in same ballpark as other cloud providers with pro's and con's. You've just added some logical isolation, extra functions like authentication, and procedural/policy protections for customers as a differentiator, yes?

sirspudd• 11 years ago

The video does look cool. I keep on intending to use my primary Linux dev box as an outwards facing web server, but every time I take steps towards this, I realize how much I would be dropping my shorts in the process.

You people should be targeting professional photographers, smug mug and friends offer really limited functionality to content owners who really should control their own material.

simonturvey3• 11 years ago

Great to see this launched at last. Congratulations guys! Good luck.

nickpsecurity5• 11 years ago

Just did some research. Turns out there is a combo of physical servers and cloud-style provisioning/pricing: it's called bare metal clouds. Gotta watch it as some say that but are virtual. Here's one I found that's physical:

http://www.softlayer.com/bare-metal-servers

The physical separation is a prerequisite for any real security as you need control over what executes in the box and definitely don't want untrusted processes sharing resources outside of what's already in TCB. Combining a rapid-provisioning, paid-hourly, physical hosting solution with strong privacy policies (e.g. MyKolab's) and terms of service backed by contract would be an awesome offing for a niche market.

The niche, off top of head, is essentially two groups: (a) people needing temporary and/or scalable resources for operation on private data; (b) people wanting steady, scalable, private servers who don't want to go all out on running their own. Category (b) would put the physical cloud in competition with with dedicated, hosting market. Potential advantages are manageability, scaling, cost reduction due to pay-per-use, and integration with popular cloud tech (eg Docker) pre-installed on that server. So, anyone looking for a business plan to submit to YCombinator feel free to do an assessment of this market as I think it has potential. The existence of the above company confirms that but I can't say how big this niche is.

condescendence3• 11 years ago

I don't mean to be an asshole, but your criticism is basically along the lines of "You're doing this all wrong, do it how I say this should be done"

They don't have physical servers, he's already answered that in your last comment. Each user is going to get their own VPS through AWS or another provider, so most likely these "hosts" are technically physically separated.

This service is basically a drag and drop app foundation, its a glorified SaaS. It's adding a layer of ease between having to purchase your own VPS and deploy these apps. Now someone can just purchase through this service, get their VPS purchased for them and deployed with a nice interface that magically sets up software.

What you're mentioning is an entirely different business plan on its own. You're talking about buying physical hardware, servers, switches, etc. Which would require setting up VLans...etc for true separation.

Cloudron is making an argument about privacy through the features they offer. I'm sure they would have loved to buy hundreds of servers and allow for everyone to have their own little Fort Knox in a Box but this is unobtainable from their viewpoint. They've come up with compromises to create a unified and monetarily obtainable product.

A good product is a compromise between what's needed, and what's available. You can't make something out of nothing (most of the time). If the resources aren't available, or if implementability isn't possible then you start to compromise. This is what happened here. Two guys who had a similar idea of privacy wanted to get together to provide a nice server/cloud service, and this cool little website is the result of that. Maybe in the future they can get their Fort Knox going, but for right now I don't see that happening because of the costs associated with it.

nickpsecurity5• 11 years ago

That comment was directed at any readers who clicked on this interested in a more private cloud offering comparable to dedicated servers in isolation. I clicked it hoping for something like that. Every similar link on private clouds was something like Cloudron or a hybrid cloud that scaled up using something like Cloudron. It was all virtualization.

So, far from a gripe at Cloudron, this second comment is for HN readers who were looking for what I was looking for. Also found the appropriate buzzword ("bare metal") to help them find comparable offerings. Far as Cloudron, the co-founder already helpfully told me what their goals/market were, they made sense, and I wished them well on that. That I had nothing more to say on that tangent is why I made a separate comment for bare-metal, cloud hosting.

dochtman• 11 years ago

I don't really understand this. "Private Cloud", to me, means a cloud that only I have access too. If you actually have access to my infrastructure, what's "private" about it?

simonturvey3• 11 years ago

Well, at some point you have to trust the legally binding contract you enter in to. Otherwise you're proposing to put servers in your garage (or wherever) which is precisely the complexity this service is attempting to get away from.

rubiquity• 11 years ago

Otherwise you're proposing to put servers in your garage

Which is also likely to be against the contract you signed with your ISP unless you bought a business line.

nebulon13• 11 years ago

If we take the term "private" to an extreme, you are absolutely right. We took the term in a similar way as it is used with virtual private servers. Also our business model will be based on providing the logistics around a private cloud, which focuses on convenience.

simonturvey3• 11 years ago

Is there any plan to allow the service to point at one's own DO or AWS account? That would remove one more privacy concern some folk seem to have.

mwilcox• 11 years ago

"Public Cloud" and "Private Cloud" are pretty standard industry terms for using the same orchestration systems on your own data center vs. an outsourced one.

joeyspn• 11 years ago

I thought the same. Their wording is a bit misleading. There's nothing like a private cloud here. In my eyes it's like bitnami [0], "cloud hosting" (or a convenient way to deploy apps in few clicks).

[0] https://bitnami.com/

nebulon13• 11 years ago

Compared to bitnami, we focus on the convenient installation of apps into your cloud. This includes also updates, backup and single-sign-on. See https://cloudron.io/features.html. We do not focus on virtual machine images that can be launched on your favorite IaaS.

vishalzone2002• 11 years ago

a hypervisor is the only private cloud :)

ams6110• 11 years ago

How is this not just a regular VPS with the word "cloud" nailed on?

shayanjm• 11 years ago

I came here to ask that EXACT question - fighting the good fight

nebulon13• 11 years ago

VPS only gets you a server. If you were to install apps (gitlab or wordpress or a wiki) on your server, you need to take care of keeping the server updated, the apps updated, backing up the apps, configuring dns, installing certs. etc. In addition, each of the apps need authentication as well.

This is the pain we intend to solve - you can install apps from our App Store. We take care of backups, updates, dns, certs etc. You can install apps using the same set of credentials / single Sign On. You can read more at https://cloudron.io/features.html.

Think of this as a 'smart server', a server intended to be used by anyone without deep technical knowledge (or doesn't want to put in the effort of self-hosting).

There's also a video on the landing page, please check it out.

bigiain• 11 years ago

How does it differ from cPanel/Plesk and similar non-cloud-branded server management solutions?

jedisct1• 11 years ago

Looks very similar to https://sandstorm.io/

Show HN: Cloudron – Get Your Own Cloud

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