What does it take to run and manage Cloudron in the longterm?

[ebelinski]

Hi everyone,

I am a bit of a novice when it comes to devops. I am evaluating Cloudron right now, which I installed as a DigitalOcean droplet. I then installed Nextcloud and Collabora using the instructions. So far, everything has been amazingly smooth. I didn't even have to SSH into my droplet and I haven't run into any difficult setup issues. But I know that all VPSes at some point require maintenance. There will always be updates to apply and issues to fix. So my question is, if I keep using Cloudron for the months and years to come, what am I getting myself into? Is this whole system more or less a turnkey solution that updates itself and won't exhibit any problems, or will real devops skills be required? If I had off the management of a Cloudron VPS to someone else without devops experience, will they have difficulties?

Thank you.

[nebulon]

Hi there,

great to hear that you found using Cloudron so far smooth and easy. In fact this is one of our main goals for the product. We try to automate as many admin tasks as possible to ideally never make the user go to SSH for maintenance. Updates are also taken care of for you. Of course no system is perfect, so there can always be issues or bugs you may encounter, but we are here help you out with support if devops experience is required to fix them.

[ruihildt]

@ebelinski said in What does it take to run and manage Cloudron in the longterm?:

Hi everyone,

I am a bit of a novice when it comes to devops. I am evaluating Cloudron right now, which I installed as a DigitalOcean droplet. I then installed Nextcloud and Collabora using the instructions. So far, everything has been amazingly smooth. I didn't even have to SSH into my droplet and I haven't run into any difficult setup issues. But I know that all VPSes at some point require maintenance. There will always be updates to apply and issues to fix. So my question is, if I keep using Cloudron for the months and years to come, what am I getting myself into? Is this whole system more or less a turnkey solution that updates itself and won't exhibit any problems, or will real devops skills be required? If I had off the management of a Cloudron VPS to someone else without devops experience, will they have difficulties?

Thank you.

Cloudron is incredibly stable. I have minimal devops skills and I've been running it for 1.5 years.
Most issues I had was because of my choice of a dirty cheap VPS and the support is really good.
If you keep external backups, even reinstalling/moving server is straightforward by following instructions.

The most difficult part is the install, so once it's running, as long as you're not out of resources, you can definitely explain how to use/install apps to someone without devops skills.