I want a personal cloud, but one that can be hosted in an actual cloud.

Ideally, I think we would something like Sandstorm but that can be deployed on everything from a home server to a Docker-based cloud service like Google Cloud Run or... Amazon Fargate (I'm not too familiar with their services).

I don't use the cloud for scaling, but so that I never have to worry about power, internet, or machine-level security.

It's always good to see some movement in the self-hosted space but I'm wondering who is this for.

People like myself are all in and enjoy the technical aspects of running Proxmox/NixOS/Docker/Kubernetes on our own hardware, building the systems exactly as we like and (hopefully) with a sound backup strategy and without a dependency on a company providing an appliance-like experience.

Running services is not trivial and solutions like this help with getting started but not with the really hard aspects on how to operate services safely with little risk of data loss.

I'm wondering if this would be more accessible and safer to operate if instead of relying on users having their own hardware it would require users to bring their a VPS (removing the need of managing hardware) and object storage (for managed backups).

So difficult but look somebody has to try. For us to make any progress we need attempts at this. Package the hardware and software, find a target demographic and go after it. I don't know if there's a mistake in going too broad or not having a tailored OS with a smaller footprint or being the general utility but we only learn through these tests. Good luck Umbrel team!

I'm very pleased that it seems like there is a real movement happening in the self-hosted space. I've been self-hosting for about 6 months and actually started with umbrel because the UI looks so polished, which is comforting for people like me who didn't live in the CL. But there's a reason dev and eng tools always have the CL fallback, the GUI limits customization and hacking. And I hit those limits super fast on Umbrel. Then I moved to dokploy, then coolify, and finally `ssh homelab "cd /opt/<homelab>/stacks/<app> && docker compose up -d"`, and I couldn't be happier to tinker to my heart's desire.

The biggest upgrade of this movement is privacy & data sovereignty, so I hope it continues growing, and hope Umbrel has success in being a gateway for a lot of selfhost-curious.

I must be missing something but $500 for an N150 mini PC pre-loaded with a 4tb nas and a custom OS is a terrible value proposition. And I have multiple form factor N1xx based machines running 24/7, so this is the exact type of thing I would be interested in. Could it have been priced in a more compelling manner without the NVME?

There's room for innovation in this space, but making a viable business here will be hard.

The enthusiast market is so wrapped up in Home Assistant and existing NAS boxes that you would need a killer app to aim first for more normie use. It looks like they tried being a crypto node at home solution and are now pivoting to be more general.

Downtime and backups is why I don't take self-hosted more seriously. If I could easily be up and running after a hardware failure or software upgrade failure, I would pay for that in a heartbeat and ditch the comparable SaaS.

As for now, I run Immich but keep Google photos around as I'm afraid to upgrade it and don't have confidence on restoring it if my server dies. See how long and full of warning messages their backup and restore page is https://docs.immich.app/administration/backup-and-restore/.

if you don't have your data when you don't have access to third parties you don't own your data.

we should start switching to solutions like this to keep control and freedom

you can find their opensource repos here: https://github.com/getumbrel

I'd really love to see an off the shelf distributed FS server in a NUC form factor that you plug in and is largely self-managed. Automatic atomic updates, QR codes to add a server to your swarm, manage it through a browser, client side encryption so a compromised server doesn't mean data exposure. If you want to get fancy, you could have user quotas so you and all your friends set up a single swarm with shared storage and you'd have a very distributed cloud. Optionally add a hetzner instance to the swarm.

This looks really well done. The software is both well-designed (from UX / UI pov) AND it's OSS AND it's just an SSD / NAS underneath it all, I think this kind of thing is a welcome addition to the market.