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> how does Sandstorm scale to real-world SaaS? It doesn't! Sandstorm is the anti-SaaS. Sandstorm is all about running fine-grained instances of apps (e.g. a se
by kentonv 11y ago
> how does Sandstorm scale to real-world SaaS?
It doesn't! Sandstorm is the anti-SaaS. Sandstorm is all about running fine-grained instances of apps (e.g. a separate Etherpad instance for every document) in a decentralized way rather than huge centralized "scalable" SaaS apps. Supporting SaaS-style apps is explicitly a non-goal for us.
Sandstorm is meant for people hosting personal servers for themselves or for businesses hosting corporate-internal apps for their employees; generally not for external-facing apps.
It turns out that decentralized apps are trivial to scale, without any fancy distributed systems architecture.
> Are you going to require your users to configure lots of API keys and services manually and manage these vendor relationships?
No. "Managing vendor relationships" is not a thing that one needs to do in Sandstorm's usage model.
Sandstorm apps are generally self-contained; they include all their code dependencies directly in the package, including the full stack of front-end, business logic, database, etc.
The only time a Sandstorm app needs to reach out to other apps and services is when the app logically needs to interact with other objects. For example, imagine a chart app which renders charts based on the contents of a spreadsheet (another app). These apps need to be connected, but this kind of connection makes logical sense to an end user. They know what a chart is, they know what a spreadsheet is, and they know they need to connect them. Sandstorm will provide something we call the "powerbox UI" to allow users to create these connections in a user-friendly way.
https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/developing/security-practices/#capability-based-usable-security https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/developing/security-prac...
> How does Sandstorm create an update-model for SaaS when developers are deploying hundreds of changes a day?
It's like mobile. You ship an app to the app market, and then users get updates from there.
- ykumar6 11y agoMakes sense, but mobile developers have realized why this update model is a problem, and have created frameworks that wrap content served up by a server. It gives them the ability to continuously iterate.
- mnutt 11y agoWhile I'm sure there's certainly some refinement to be done on how app updates work, Sandstorm explicitly closes the WebView loophole. An app you run doesn't have access to make backend network requests or frontend javascript requests unless you grant that permission. So it's not really possible to build an app that pretends to run on your server but is really just a wrapper for a SaaS.
- ykumar6 11y agoAlso, are business style corporate/internal apps going out of existent when they are faced with a fierce SaaS company competing for that business. It's almost like the SaaS DNA is to move very quickly (break things) and react to customers. If your developers cannot continuously deploy to their customers and make changes behind the scenes, how will your developers compete with a Slack? Is your only value proposition data security?
- kentonv 11y agoDevelopers on Sandstorm don't have to maintain infrastructure. They don't have to protect and back up user data. They don't have to implement authentication, sharing, document management, search, etc. They don't need to think about consensus algorithms or distributed infrastructure problems. They can relax their security diligence as many common security bugs are mitigated by Sandstorm itself. A guy in Turkey and a guy in France working in their free time built Wekan, a Sandstorm app that easily replaces Trello. Two people in their spare time vs. a whole funded company. There is no way that they'd be able to build and run a SaaS service competing with Trello -- and no way I personally would use a service run by two random guys in their spare time -- but building a Sandstorm app was no problem for them, and has been incredibly useful to me. To me the question is: how will SaaS developers be able to compete against Sandstorm developers that can build apps so much more easily?
- ykumar6 11y agoThe guy is Turkey or France building an app on sandstorm has bigger challenges than worrying about how to manage infrastructure. He needs to figure out how to create a viable business, and his first order concern is getting to P/M fit by rapidly iterating and delivering product (often making several changes a day). If they create a viable business, they have enough leverage and margins (given SaaS has very favorable unit economics) to pay for a infra and a dude to manage it,
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]