The Sandstorm team writes about their platform for self-hosting open source web apps, plus security and hosting decisions.
Commenters link it to explain Sandstorm's goals, like federated hosting and app demo buttons, and the Oasis hosting price of $6 a month.
How is that any different from Hotmail or Yahoo? (Web)mail as a service is about as old as http, smtp and imap. Hotmail even was a cool startup runnning on all FreeBSD before MS bought them up...
I don't think it makes sense to compare X as a service, to implementing X as a service. Of course it is a bit of a hassle to set up email. But it's not really that hard: the hardest part is probably setting up SSL certs. Now, if you want to complicate things with spf/dkim, anti-virus and greylisting -- things do get a little complicated.
Personally I think spf is strange band-aid, and luckily I get bye quite well with just greylisting against spam (most spam I get is actually to a throw-away address that got leaked in the Adobe/Macromedia hack: yay site-specific email address!).
This here, is an example of what I mean:
https://scaron.info/technology/debian-mail-postfix-dovecot.html
It's not exactly rocket science[1] for someone that is able to set up a secure server with password login disabled and only regular-user login via ssh keys -- which I consider the minimum for any internet-facing system unless you have a very special use-case, and a really good plan.
Now, if you can't set up a server -- you can't set up a server. I'm not saying we shouldn't make it easer -- eg:
https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-07-mailpile.html
or:
https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-11-roundcube.html
(Note, these both rely on sandstorm.io handling incomming smtp, as far as I can tell. At…
Cap'n'Proto (& by extension Sandstorm) very much intends to allow references (capabilities) to be passed around, which is in direct conflict with the "#1 and in bold" on this list, gRPC being "first-order", which I think the author is saying means that systems have to marshal all the data to communicate.
This is discussed- in relation to Sandstorm- in a Sandstorm blog post dating from last December. Other notables- the post mentions CORBA explicitly, and it discusses persisting capabilities (anti "First Class" objects extreme if I'm reading OP right).
https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-12-15-capnproto-0.5.html
I wonder if it would make sense to package a kind of "standard" version of the app, with the most-used / most important extensions, content types and whatever configured, as a Sandstorm [0] app. That way you could even make the "needs to by set up by a programmer" part optional, and target a larger user base. And you'd have a demo instance right away! [1]
[0] https://sandstorm.io/
[1] https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-02-06-app-demo.html
Wave wasn't just laggy, it was frequently down. All sorts of apps with scaling issues can work better with the Sandstorm model. The whole Sandstorm idea really started clicking for me when I read one of their earlier posts on motivations: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-require-federated-hosting.html
That made me a backer.
One other possibly-cool thing is that any open source web app, when packaged for Sandstorm, can get a "Try it now" button of your own. That's what I explain at https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-02-06-app-demo.html but I figure it's worth stating clearly here in a comment, to save people a click.
Thanks for coming to the meetup.
Making it easier to run open source apps really is the reason I started this project, not marketing.
(Everything I wrote in this blog post is actually what I think: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-require-federated-hosting.html)