Cloudron Forum

marcusquinn

I just messages someone about the Cloudron forum and liked my quote on it too much not to share:

"One of the most positive and proactive communities I've joined. It's like a System Admin's therapy group "

marcusquinn

Hey, big fan of what you're doing here!

Is anyone interested in sponsored App creation?

As a business, we can budget for this as a reasonable expense and happy to contribute to both the creator and the community with helping fund these things.

marcusquinn

I'm thinking knowing this can help build the community and customers, that ultimately invest in a platform we all seem to enjoy. Likes & reviews on these places could help.

I'll start, quite an easy one and common I'm sure: https://alternativeto.net/software/cloudron/

Previously tried Cloudways, Runcloud, D2C.io, all pretty good - but Cloudron just spoke to me for the low entry point for personal use, large variety of apps we already use and were setup with more complex K8S and multi-server/provider setups.

Just made complete sense to consolidate a lot of that and optimise for single-server setups with a more accessible admin interface that didn't require high-level dev-ops in-house for the more common needs of any open-source-first and privacy-conscious people or team.

I try to @mention Cloudron regularly on Twitter too on comments on other large open source account tweets for a bit more interest from those likely to find the same satisfying time-saving I'm here for.

marcusquinn

The absence of 2FA on the LDAP login Apps makes me nervous for GDPR and typical security needs nowadays.

I don't know that anyone's ever had a break-in yet, and fail2ban is a good start but expectations for 2FA are increasing.

I wonder if a global solution would be for all Cloudron packaged apps to use a Cloudron login screen with 2FA instead of the app's native logins?

Realising this is development overhead in packaging, open to discussion and alternative suggestions. Hoping this idea is more evolution than revolution.

The more we use any data-silo, the potentially more valuable or attractive it becomes for unscrupulous targeting.

Thoughts?

marcusquinn

Who needs Twitter, when we have the Cloudron forum to follow each day

marcusquinn

I'm sure we all search for "{app name} alternatives" plenty.

I'm also sure we all benefit from Cloudron having more subscribers and growing the team and community.

Therefore, may I suggest a thread for links to places people are finding Cloudron or similar and using all the goodwill, and many people here, to help with some good old-fashioned organic marketing and pr for the cause.

I've added a review and rating here (surferking):

https://alternativeto.net/software/cloudron/about/

Post any other links and I'm happy to do the same, I'm sure we almost all are. Always genuine reviews - but you don't always get if you don't ask

marcusquinn

Hey @girish and @nebulon in the time I've been here, it's great to be a part of what you have created in the platform and the community, and seeing new names all the time appear with brilliant work and ideas really is giving life to Cloudron and everyone collaborating.

I feel that a dedicate "Freelance Work" group would be good for many. There's people here with great skills, and there's people here with clients, budgets, contact networks etc.

I feel that a pinned post at the top of this new group should say something like:

Welcome to the Cloudron community, we hope you will find many like-minds here for making good things happen with the Cloudron platform and community.

If you have work or skills to offer, please post your needs and expectations to announce your availability and interests.

All agreements are between yourselves and the Cloudron forum is simply a place to meet people that can help each other.

Please state your preferred contact method; DM chat in the forum is probably the safest way to share contact details privately.

Be respectful for the value of what you ask for or offer. It takes years of experience to know how to do something in hours and days. Respect your work or your developer commission for the value of the results to you both. Allow for unexpected issues and maintenance.

You can include links to your work if you wish but no affiliate links 3rd-party platforms, and no freelance recruitment platform marketing please.

This is only for person to person networking, so no company promotion please. If you are seeking or know of full-time employment opportunities, that is still a personal networking referral.

Cloudron is not a party to any contracts, offers no endorsement or assurances on the forum members communications and reserves the right to remove any advertising that is not related to the Cloudron platform, Apps and community spirit. Caveat Emptor & Caveat Venditor; Buyer Beware & Seller Beware.

The moderators reserve the right to query any post or member on the legitimacy of their post, remove any post at any time for any reason without obligation for explanation, and all other forum etiquette rules apply.

Welcome to your Cloudron Freelance Work community, and we look forward to hearing what you can all create together!

Something like that

marcusquinn

We can sponsor the following for anyone wanting to get paid to package?

Need these to migrate over our current instances:

Need solutions for:

Looking at the current rate of App packaging and launch on Cloudron, I can only guess all this might take 5 years unless there's something I'm missing.

So many great Apps but I'm not getting any closer to app system consolidation without having a bunch of these. How can we speed this packaging process up?

Sorry, I'd love to learn and do but just can't neglect current duties right now. What I can do is divert a bit of budget if that helps.

If the community here is in a similar position, perhaps we can have a whip-round and contribute to recruiting for this?

I also have some seriously decent privacy-conscious client potential for all of this - but we have to dog-food anything before we can promote it.

Very happy with Cloudron - all features definitely going in a great direction - but how do we get more Apps into the Store faster? That App Request list is going up faster than down.

marcusquinn

@JOduMonT I think the world has change now there's more value in data than people released but capitalism knows and is both; competing to acquire, and exploiting, in ways beyond most people's imaginations - until they find election campaigning shenanigans but don't know what to do about it.

So necessary to trust in services; yes.

Trust them with your valuable and private data?

When Google is reading your shopping email confirmations and Facebook is reading everything with a "Like" script, I think it's a responsibility to have parts of your data world not visible to the marketing world.

Privacy, encryption and permissions should be as essential in schooling for the Technology Revolution as literacy was for The Renaissance.

So - data privacy politics for 6.1 anyone?

marcusquinn

@girish I'll log a ticket with them and keep you posted. This forum is a sys admin treasure trove of useful experience, so it's the least I can do!

marcusquinn

I'm a fan of open source and certainly encourage it with my team - but it comes with overhead and responsibilities beyond working on the actual product, so it's not something to take on lightly or without expectation for the time-costs in managing that.

On the flip-side open-source is infinite almost free referral marketing.

From a business point of view, I would think that hosts themselves should be the primary target for sponsorship since the more that can offer Cloudron, the broader their potential customer-base and those customers subscription to their resources.

If Cloudron.io were able to Terraform the Cloudron instances to popular hosts and then the cloudron.io site was the only way to manage multiple hosts with a subscription, I could see value in that because the subscription costs is still less than the time-costs being saved.

I'm fine with hybrid models, we can hire developers to fix issues if they have a higher priority for us than you guys but also it is important to me that the platform commitments we make have a sustainable business model to remain motivated and evolving as needs arise.

Your work, your choice, either way big kudos for what you've already done and thanks for saving me a ton of time and money already!

marcusquinn

It's a no - maybe - the shortness of the answer doesn't convince me completely but not an immediate need and with the stories of pretty painless migration I'll post again if I try them again on the subject.

( and plugging Cloudron in all related conversations now )

marcusquinn

Be handy to see who hasn't accepted their invite email yet (with a resend invite button) and who's not logged in for a while.

Bonus points for a login log to review user engagement with the platform.

marcusquinn

Sure, in the meantime, knowing how business can stretch developers thin - let's help them with the PR around the interweb as more subscribers equals more funds to recruit

https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/2877/upvote-and-review-cloudron-on-all-the-alternative-to-type-websites-to-help-grow-the-team-and-community

marcusquinn

Very much looking forward to seeing how you develop the multi-host features for 6.0.

If I may suggest for consideration in that it would be very useful to be able to move an entire domain with all it's configurations and apps from one Cloudron to another with a button, confirmation and function that went through the processes. I image it would need to pause all services on that domain during the transition to ensure data is frozen but it could be a scheduled maintenance or just a staging Cloudron to live Cloudron launch process.

So we can set everything up on one Cloudron instance, and them move the whole thing to another separate and dedicated one.

Might be a big ask - but though it worth bearing in mind in your designs and planning.

marcusquinn

Everyone contributing in the forums, codebase and apps are heroes!

I wish I could get more involved on that side but the next best I can do is keep telling every developer I work with and know online about it to try it, and get you more developer users — because I think we all can see the value in both the platform and this community.

I shudder to think of doing all that Cloudron does any other way now, and have been through pretty much every way of doing Sys Admin in 20+ years of tech.

marcusquinn

I think this would be a luxury/business/pro feature.

Can we consider a way to have 2 x Cloudrons:

One would be the live and active server.

The second would be the destination for backups but directly cloning to a second instance as a hot-swap.

The use case would be faster recover from a total server failure or some kind of provider issue.

It could be a second VPS with the same provider (I appreciate server snapshots are also an option there), or with another provider.

I appreciate this is not a high-availability setup, and there would be data-loss in the event of needing - but that's no different to a backup restore.

Switching to the hot-swap would just involve updating the DNS A record for the hot-swap, and then logging into it to trigger it to update all other DNS managed by the Cloudron.

It can come with all the usual warnings on data-loss from swapping, and not recommending swapping back after etc.

marcusquinn

Just a thought for the business-model side of open-source because as much as I love and promote open-source, I always look at what the business model is behind it. Any software choice is a long-term commitment and I want to know that progress is motivated and sustainable.

Partner programs / subscription levels. Odoo has a good example of this. The return on investment for the Partners being implementation referrals.

https://www.odoo.com/become-a-partner

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