Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

bitpush

> In the pre-cloud days, open source worked - authors distributed their software, and everyone "hosted" it for themselves (i.e. ran it on their own PC) This is just rose tinted vision of the past. None of the software of the past had the capability, reliability or robustness of modern sass.

EGreg

How do I reach out to you? We're building something that you might want to be a part of. (The "Safebox" comes with all the software you need, and you can just clone its AMI on AWS etc.) Would love to have a conversation. If you want to message me, find my email on https://qbix.com/about

drunner

I think the time for this space is here. The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever. Currently, a lot of this space is docker compose based and simply inaccessible to so many who may otherwise be interested. Whether or not it's this project or another, I hope something gathers enough steam soon to truly break the barriers to entry.

joshmn

An aside: Fantastico was such a wonderful piece of software for me to learn and toy and tinker with web stuff. I was so impressed by the simplicity of it. (I phased out of the shared scene a almost two decades ago; I guess everyone moved to Softaculous, https://softaculous.com/fantastico/ )

jerf

"We (Imbue, the company I work for) also offer a managed version, which I think is really important to making this widely accessible - and it gives us a straightforward business model to support the project." Looking at your hosted page, I see no reference to backups. I see in your docs reference to backup, but you should definitely offer some sort of turnkey, appropriately-marked-up backup solution. Configuration difficulty is what kills self-hosting on the front end, updates make it hard over time, but when it all dies and then I have no backup is when I give up. I can't find any reference to disk size limits anywhere. Can I host Immich on this? Can I host my media server? What will it cost? Surely not $10/month for my media collection. I'm not a hoarder and mostly have stuff ripped from my personally-owned media, which limits the size, and you're still not hosting that for $10/month. I see you have Jellyfin in the set of apps but I don't know what it will cost. The CPU & RAM limits I understand from the deploy page. Oh, and I'm specifically referring to your hosted service here.

pietz

In case someone is asking: THIS is what a launch article should be like. 10/10.

0c3ca83

It's weird seeing someone trying to promote self-hosting, while building everything with Claude.

Winfred-zz

>At the core, it's just an Ubuntu machine with a web server that hosts a dashboard and routes HTTP(s) requests to containerized apps. So no fail over/redundancy? I think at minimum it should be two machines, so one can break. That is one of the important features of cloud applications as far as I'm concerned. You don't have to deal with the problem of a single computer breaking.

andrewoneone

seems kind of like https://caprover.com/

armanj

systemd is all you need

skybrian

This pitch is somewhat interesting, but, much like Sandstorm, browsing the library of pre-built apps kind of leaves me cold. It's too much like browsing a rather tiny mobile app store. There are maybe three apps that I might be interested in. Since we have AI now, I think exe.dev's pitch is better: they provide Linux VMs, a web proxy, and integrations. You can ask the AI to build whatever web app you like. I'd love to have exe.dev, but running on my Mac Mini.

redrix

If this can largely automate the backup and update side of things, then it seems like a great middle ground for people like me: I’m trying to self-host as much of my stuff as possible, but don’t have time to tinker like I used to. Hence updates, backups (etc) fall by the wayside in favour of “set and forget”.

jasongi

I remember back when I first got into self-hosting (over a decade ago), I had a Netgear READYNAS. People made a small amount of plugins you could install. But the CPU was ARM before that was cool (I think mine was actually SPARC!) so it was a lot of effort to get things to compile, so plugins were usually quite outdated. Then I decided to painfully break out of vendor lock-in, built my own NAS with FreeNAS which was all the rage (still attached to a vendor, but at least I could control the hardware). This was before Docker really took off - the plugins were installed in FreeBSD jails. It worked for a while, but again, plugins could be woefully out of date and broken, upgrading the OS was a pain and would break all your plugins. Through the 10+ years of this... I now follow two simple rules: - separate your network storage and application hosting. Yes, it complicates things a little bit with NFS setups but it is a forcing function for a more resilient setup - use the docker container provided by the maintainers or LinuxServer.io. Vendor maintained wrappers can be initially helpful but end up as a form of tech debt when they're abandoned or neutered - especially when they're freemium and the company starts looking to squeeze. The quiet part of self-hosting is that it shifts the responsibility of security to the user. I'm sure cloudinabottle has more sensible defaults than provided docker containers, or builds in reverse proxies etc, but I doubt they're offering to take on liability for data loss or breaches. The problem I see you'll face are two-fold: 1. Projects like this have the power users self-select away from it and those who need a lot of hand-holding to self-select into it. If I know how to configure and deploy a docker container already I have no incentive to contribute. ReadyNAS got around this by having folks charge for their plugins (that were just OSS projects packaged up for their OS) but then it ruins the appeal, they likely only got away with it because they were only a couple of bucks and you were already locked in to the ecosystem via the hardware. 2. If the hosted aspect actually makes you money, required for the project to be continued long term, capitalism will ensure that incumbent cloud providers take that away from you by offering ready-made instances at your cost-price, like they did with redis, elasticsearch etc. Note that these are only issues if you're motivated by making a profit, or even a cost-neutral project. But if this is a charitable exercise backed by an entity that doesn't need the money, I wish you all the best - more things that let people dip their toes in are good! The cloud is all rent-seeking subscriptions and even with the recent supply shortages: fast, small, low-power compute is incredibly cheap these days, especially old business/mini machines.

passive

I really like the idea, and I would like to see Tailscale evolve Aperture in this direction. Tailscale is already an easy way for anyone to connect their devices, which is essential for any sort of "personal cloud", and Aperture, while initially something of an AI gateway, is also facilitating connections to other services and apps. If you're building a personal cloud, you also want your AI connected to it, but probably with some degree of management. Aperture already provides a fair amount in this area, and probably with a connector for Cloud in a Bottle, could give your AI safe access.

tesnorindian

Reminds me of my old idea dating back to 2014 ( https://linuxdreams.blogspot.com/2015/03/cloud-in-box-applia... ). Interestingly the blog is still active. I did a few pitches related to this at Nasscom Startup warehouse and IITM RTBI. Though this was welcomed by the panel members but it never took off due to lack of capital for such a startup during those times in India. I had to abandon and focus on my day job.

kolleraa

This is a great project! Yes, the personal cloud is coming and it's going to be for everyone. I'm working on a project with similar goals but some different design decisions - instead of the typical containers I'm going for thin-client apps that hit a common data layer built on a fully serverless architecture. Not ready for production quite yet, but for those interested: https://starkeep.app/

anigbrowl

How is this different from say Docker? I procrastinated getting acquainted with the latter for a long time because I thought it was more for industrial-scale infrastructure, but when I finally wound up using it I was surprised at how easy and low-maintenance it was.

bo1024

Cloudron does something very similar (I'm a user): https://www.cloudron.io/

charcircuit

No offense, but this is not accessible to everyone. Seriously, take a look at the setup instructions and tell me with a straight face that a 4 year old could set this up. https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/setup/shared_homeserver.html There's no reason this couldn't be made as simple as double clicking a .exe and then the whole thing gets setup.

wmf

Seems weird not to mention Umbrel.