Merging mulitple Cloudrons in to one big new one?

[jdaviescoates]

I have numerous Cloudrons running on various VPS servers.

Now I'm thinking I might just get one big dedicated server and put everything on there instead.

I guess the thing to do would be to move my main biggest one first, and then to migrate the apps from the others over too.

But what about user accounts and email and stuff?

Has anyone done something like this before? What's the best way to approach it. All thoughts, guidance and ideas warmly received!

Thanks!

[luckow]

@jdaviescoates It's doable, but it ends up being kind of monkey business. My first question is: why? It feels much better to have more than one Cloudron, because the moment you reboot (and your entire digital life depends on one instance) ... That's the reason I wrote this blog post -> https://blog.cloudron.io/ldap2ldap/

But back to your question. Moving applications between different instances is a piece of cake. If you don't use the LDAP feature on every Cloudron instance, I don't think it's a problem, it's just a matter of time.
The moment you use LDAP on each instance separately, the real problem is handling the app-internal UUIDs. Having a Jane Doe on each Cloudron instance does not solve the problem of the UUID of Jane Doe on Cloudron instance 1 (in, say, Wekan) and the Jane on Cloudron instance 2. For the Wekan app, these are two different users (and you need to match the "real" Jane to the other user).

In one of the recent Cloudron updates, LDAP user takeover was introduced. I never had the time to test all aspects. But maybe this is an option.

Connect all Cloudron instances to your new, large instance via the external LDAP feature and "take over" the users from the "old" instances. I have no idea what happens if there is a Jane Doe on each individual instance and what happens when you transfer them over to the large instance.

In addition to these issues, you need to explain the new infrastructure to your users. In all my previous migrations, this took the most time.

[jdaviescoates]

@luckow thanks for your input

@luckow said in Merging mulitple Cloudrons in to one big new one?:

why?

In part just so everything in one place and so I just have to manage, maintain, update etc one server instead of several servers.

But also because e.g.

• I've got an instance of PeerTube on one of the smaller VPSs (it's bridport.tv so makes sense to have it on my.bridport.coop where I've got all the Bridport stuff), but I've realised that it really needs a lot more power than that server has.

• I'd also like to give access to some of the apps of got on my.uniteddiversity.coop to all the people on my.bridport.coop - at present this would mean them creating another account and then not having the same credentials for both (although to be fair most of the apps currently on my.bridport.coop aren't LDAP enabled anyway, either because they don't have it - like Discourse - or because it doesn't really suit the use case - public instances of PeerTube, Mastodon, Pixelfed).

• I think quite a few of the apps would likely benefit for the increased power the dedicated server would have.

The issues you've highlighted wouldn't be that big an issue for me because I think I'm currently the only person/ name who is on all of them so there aren't two Jane Does (but there would be if I started saying "sign-up over on my.uniteddiversity.coop so I can give you access to our shared x too".

The biggest issue would be getting the handful of people actively using some of the other Cloudrons over onto the One Big Cloudron, but currently the numbers of people I'm talking about would be manageable (but this gets harder as more people start joining the other secondary Cloudrons).