LWN: Comments on "Sandstorm personal cloud platform"

Sandstorm personal cloud platform

kentonv — Sun, 20 Jul 2014 21:57:13 +0000

Update: We've now started a crowdfunding campaign for Sandstorm:

Sandstorm personal cloud platform

zenaan — Mon, 14 Jul 2014 02:30:09 +0000

An idea I've had for a long years which might fuel potential docker-like projects is application-specific WINE containers.

Over the years, some proprietary apps (which some unfortunate sods like me still have to use on occasion) have gone from "good luck with that" to "gold" level compatibility/ runtime support, only to later slip back down to say "bronze".

When an environment/ setup/ version of WINE ready for the installation of that app is at "gold" level, then that env ought be containerized, so that it can be deserialized/ unzipped/ copied as needed, ready for consistently installing at "gold" level, that specific proprietary application.

Sandstorm personal cloud platform

smoogen — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 18:50:17 +0000

This is a very interesting project with how I would like to have a cloud on my laptop :).

Sandstorm personal cloud platform

kentonv — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 03:46:19 +0000

Sandstorm lead dev here. Thanks for the write-up! Happy to answer any questions people have.

This design would be totally impossible without modern Linux kernel features like namespacing, cgroups, and seccomp-bpf. Lightweight sandboxing means it's reasonable to sandbox at the granularity of documents and spin-up sandboxes on-demand -- simply not feasible with traditional VMs. Meanwhile, using native-code sandboxes (as opposed to programming-language-specific) means we've been able to port a lot of existing open source apps to quickly bootstrap the ecosystem. In just the last couple weeks we've ported Mailpile, Ghost, ShareLaTeX, Mediawiki, and others. These aren't on the app list yet as we're still polishing a couple things, but will be there soon.

Many thanks to the Linux kernel devs for making all this possible!