
Show HN: Portal – Personal Cloud Servers - portalplatform
https://portalplatform.net/developer-release
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dublinben
This just looks like expensive managed hosting. It's still just cloud hosting
on someone else's hardware.

For truly personal 'cloud' apps, I recommend projects like Freedombox or
Sandstorm. They make it this easy to deploy cloud apps on hardware you
actually physically own and control.

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peterwwillis
I think this is much easier for the average consumer. Reminds me of the old
"virtual hosting" platforms that made it easy enough for your grandma to set
up & maintain a website. I like it.

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ocdtrekkie
People are quick to condemn GeoCities, but it was a pretty fantastic thing for
the world, when you get right down to it. I'm excited to see lots of providers
looking at doing similar things for the modern web.

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ocdtrekkie
Advice: Link your actual app store/list somewhere. On an app-based platform,
most people's first question is "what apps can I run on it?"

I think I saw your thing before at an earlier stage because I'm heavily
interested in/messing with Sandstorm.io. There's a lot of stuff you can
currently run on this that would not work (yet) on Sandstorm, which is cool.
Particularly a game server like Minecraft.

My question is what kind of security is employed to ensure apps are frequently
updated, apps cannot interfere with other apps, etc.?

You may want to fix how your Terms of Service is presented. On Firefox, it
does not word wrap, and scrolls horizontally... pretty much indefinitely
inside that box.

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portalplatform
Thanks for the detailed feedback. We used to list apps that we have got
working ourselves but we decided it's not a great idea to try to support a
bunch of third-party open source apps ourselves. We hope we can encourage the
actual developers to let users load their app on Portal, it's pretty simple
usually. We definitely need some examples though.

Each app is a separate KVM virtual machine. By default, apps only have access
to data they've created, not the data of other apps. Apps can communicate over
a private (virtual) "LAN" using private IPs. An app's LAN and Internet access
can also be disabled.

Our idea for keeping apps up to date is to replace the entire operating system
and app software every time the app VM starts up. For example, restarting an
app based on "ubuntu14lts" loads the latest daily release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
with all its security patches.

The only thing that survives an app restart is the /data drive, with the idea
that not even a rootkit will be cleared by a simple restart.

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ocdtrekkie
I guess the biggest challenge is, if say, I signed up for this today, would I
be able to use it as a non-technical user, if there's no pre-prepared apps to
install? And even if other developers are supporting your manifest standard,
if you have no central app list, how does someone signing up for your service
know what apps are available for it, and where they can get them?

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portalplatform
We're hoping we can encourage app developers themselves to support Portal as a
platform, and if we can, we will include those apps as "Officially Supported"
apps.

You're correct that right now it's really only possible for developers to use.
That will change quickly as we get officially supported apps. We're working to
make at least a few apps that work for non-developers within weeks. Thanks
again!

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portalplatform
We're already working with some developers to make personal cloud server apps
and really want to encourage more developers to start. There are thousands of
apps that need to be written and it's a lot more fun than working in propriety
mobile environments!

And it's not just about writing "Portal apps", we want every app that runs on
Portal to also run on competing personal cloud server platforms. That's what
true decentralization requires.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
So, have you looked into how Sandstorm packages files, and whether one of your
JSON manifests could be easily added next to a Sandstorm package in order to
run it? Or, oppositely, could your platform install an app based on a provided
SPK file (and it's own built-in manifest)?

The biggest difference is that it looks like you have people include a script
to install the app, and Sandstorm packages the app and all it's dependencies
'pre-installed', and is mostly independent of Linux flavor.

Since Sandstorm packages have all the dependencies and app data in read-only,
and all of the user's app data in /var, I would think it'd be relatively
possible to figure out how to get the two formats to play nice.

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portalplatform
I haven't looked at Sandstorm packages in detail yet. I think it definitely
should be possible to make a Sandstorm-runner app for Portal. I've
experimented with doing this for Docker. It should also be possible to run a
full copy of Sandstorm (or more than one) as a Portal app VM. We'll support
any and all standards that emerge.

For now, we're just trying to keep it really simple and the JSON config seems
as simple as we can make it. Apps could do a lot more, like include their own
OS images or rootfs tarballs if it makes sense.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
My thoughts on running Sandstorm in an app on a server that runs apps is
similar to my thoughts on running ownCloud on Sandstorm. There's definitely
uses, to be able to use features the parent app platform doesn't support
(Sandstorm doesn't do everything ownCloud does yet), but running an app
platform inside an app platform is sometimes silly. (Though it's probably
relatively trivial to run Sandstorm inside Portal Platform.)

Though running individual Sandstorm apps as individual Portal Platform apps is
probably also doable, since SPKs contain everything a Linux server needs to
run an app. Sandstorm and Portal Platform manifests are pretty similar, and
the way the apps are run are similar.

My thought here is just that if your 'install' script can unpack and set up
from an SPK file, you might be able to take advantage of some of the apps
already being published (currently) exclusively for Sandstorm.

I've been poking around Windows' SDKs to turn iOS and Android apps and stuff
into Windows apps, so the concept of this sort of thing happens to be fresh in
my head currently. :D

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skrowl
Please post this again when it doesn't come with "Current users of the service
should be expect frequent downtime and even data loss during the Developer
Release period. "

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portalplatform
I think we may have gone overboard with the wording there!

Updated to more accurately reflect the situation:

 _Current users of the service should expect some downtime and must careful to
backup their data during the Developer Release period._

We haven't had any unexpected downtime or data loss with current users, we
just wanted to make sure to warn people that they're using something so new.
Thanks!

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joshmn
So you want us to pay you so you can test things?

No thanks.

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portalplatform
That's fair, but it's not just a test, you can really use it. In fact, our own
domain runs on Portal. Our web server and email server are two simple custom
Portal apps I created in a few minutes for our own use.

The point of the disclaimer is just to make it clear that we expect there to
be some initial hiccups, as with any new service.

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devicenull
No IPv6? Guessing not, as your website doesn't even use it.

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general_failure
Congrats on launching!

We are working on a similar product at Cloudron
([https://www.cloudron.io](https://www.cloudron.io)). We use containers
instead of kvm.

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portalplatform
Thanks. Congratulations to you as well.

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dang
This looks like a duplicate of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9040423](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9040423).

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ocdtrekkie
I had seen this before, but yeah, it's been a while and it makes sense to
announce a change in status in a new post.

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portalplatform
Thank you!

(And no, I do not know ocdtrekkie although I am also an OCD trekkie.)

