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

Posted by zplizzi 12 hours ago

Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone(cloudinabottle.org)

454 points | 225 commentspage 5

thelastgallon 8 hours ago|

We need gmail, docs and sheets replacements. With AI, maybe people can develop solid alternatives very quickly. And Linux phones.

Trillion dollar companies try to extract more and more from us, the only response is for us to develop alternative solutions and continuously chip away at their strengths- what made them monopolies in the first place.

smalltorch 8 hours ago||

Hey cool sounds like everyone's on the same page. Here is a start.

https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/tmailplus

xetifafa 6 hours ago||

I haven't used it extensively, but I've heard cryptpad is good.

6thbit 10 hours ago||

Running the authoritative dns for the zone seems elegant, although wouldn’t that imply you absolutely can’t use cloudflare or similar services to avoid ddos/bots?

pjmlp 5 hours ago||

Basically what we were already doing before Cloud took over distributed computing and grid computing as industry terms, Open Stack and a few others.

yoz-y 8 hours ago||

One thing that I found LLMs useful for is devops.

I had rather good experience using agents to setup and deploy own cloud, Jellyfin and co. I experimented also getting a VPS, just giving the LLM the ssh keys and having at it. It’s pretty good.

If the AI stays afloat, then I think the future lies somewhere there. Not too sure about the security side of the things …

wiether 5 hours ago||

  > just giving the LLM the ssh keys and having at it. It’s pretty good.

I'm mostly fine letting AI write code because its easily auditable and you can follow changes through the Git history.

Whereas, it you let the AI go free on a server, you mostly have no idea what it did and where, so it's quite hard to audit and even harder to try and fix things.

So, unless relying on a declarative paradigm like NixOS does, I'm not ready to give AI the keys to my castles

walrus01 1 hour ago|||

While admittedly this can be a bit risky, there's a lot less possible blast radius or thing that can go catastrophically wrong if you give the LLM the ssh keys and sudo access on a KVM VM (or equivalent) that's been created as a blank slate exclusively as its playground. I have a template debian 13 KVM VM that can have its ssh host keys and hostname wiped, other unique per-node things, and duplicated with a basic bash script in a couple of minutes to deploy for home lab testing.

I'm fine with giving a "smart" self hosted LLM like qwen 3.8-flash-next Q8 access to it to do things in opencode.

Don't give it the keys to any castle but give it access to one specific containerized thing...

wiether 1 hour ago||

  > for home lab testing

So you're talking about a sandbox, not a prod server hosting personal data?

walrus01 12 minutes ago||

I'm saying a staging/testing environment is a good place to prove your specific configuration of "smart" LLM isn't going to do something wildly wrong, before you even think to trust it in a production environment. And as a place to develop things like playbooks and similar documentation to feed into an LLM's context for ongoing maintenance and operations of something in production.

yoz-y 4 hours ago|||

Admittedly this was not my castle. More of a $1.5/mo shed that I got just to try this.

BetterThanSober 2 hours ago||

That's a cheap shed, what's the provider and spec?

domh 4 hours ago||

This is not me saying security doesn't matter (because it does) but having everything not publicly accessible and only accessible over Tailscale or Wireguard makes me slightly happier.

scosman 9 hours ago||

Proxmox + community-scripts.org is pretty great.

yoz-y 8 hours ago||

I think what this needs to be truly accessible by general public is a mobile app (most people don’t have computers) and to be able to deploy it (including setting up domains) from there. Payments would definitely be a problem because of the various app stores’ rules.

rgun 10 hours ago||

Great project! I have had conversations along these lines with my colleagues for quite some time now. Will definitely try.

The docs mention cloudinabottle.toml but the app repos all have openhost.toml. Did you folks change the name of the platform?

Also, can you point to how the unified auth works? Couldn't find anything in the manifest spec.

ball_of_lint 9 hours ago|

Yeah, it was called Openhost for a while before changing to Cloud in a Bottle. Either filename works.

It proxies requests from the user to installed apps, and adds a header 'is-owner'. Apps have to be built to respect that header - some apps do this by running their own little proxy/sidecar that will detect that header and inject saved credentials.

baalimago 6 hours ago||

A bit narrow definition of a "cloud", no..? More like a microservice server on rails

Bits missing from cloud being global CDN (selfhosted), routing, regional sharding, etc.

joshmn 12 hours ago||

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/)

harhargange 7 hours ago|

I recently bought a motherboard for my first self made pc. Six to eight sata slots is already enormous and the fact that you pay once and use your hardware freely opened my eyes. I was paying a subscription for cloud 1 tb for a trivial service. I am now hoarding my torrents worry free and plan to convert it to NAS. However i do still use my onedrive plan shared with three friends for 10 dollars for sharing large files till i set up my own nas with a good permanent net connection. The other issue is that I’m renting currently and if I’m changing countries I’ll have to rely on the onedrive again

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