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I think Sandstorm missed out on a potential business opportunity that I will call, for lack of a better term, SaaS as a service. Here's what I mean. Suppose I

I think Sandstorm missed out on a potential business opportunity that I will call, for lack of a better term, SaaS as a service. Here's what I mean. Suppose I develop an application that fits nicely into Sandstorm's grain-based model. But I don't want to give it away. And just as important, I don't want my users to have to deal with this weird Sandstorm thing. I want to sell the app as a SaaS subscription, like so many other web applications that people are used to. Yet, I don't want to deal with recurring billing, hosting my users' data, 24/7 availability, etc. So I develop my product as a Sandstorm app, then pay Sandstorm to host it under my own domain, with Sandstorm being invisible to the user. As far as the user is concerned, it's a SaaS product that I'm providing, like any other SaaS product. But I don't have to implement recurring billing, back up users' data, worry about availability or security, etc. Does this make sense to anyone else?

vertex-four 10y ago
That's missing out entirely on the point of Sandstorm, which is to provide users with the ability to host their own cloud software. Sandstorm as a business was meant to be in support of that goal, rather than the product being made to fit whatever would make the business profitable at the expense of its goals.
simplehuman 10y ago
I think you are talking about developing a market place. Very different ball game than sandstorm.
- eitland 10y ago
  IMO closely related though. I wanted something like this: crowdfunding of apps, preferably open source. But while I though it could fit well in on top of sandstorm I understand it would be hard to pull of in a balanced way.
kentonv 10y ago
Maybe. Our feeling was that there are many other PaaS's out there already with this kind of focus, and Sandstorm doesn't really offer anything that would make it better than the alternatives. Instead, the focus of Sandstorm is to create infrastructure where the servers "report to the user" rather than to the developer, which is a very different kind of problem. I do think there are permutations of fine-grained containerization which might be interesting as a PaaS but we consciously decided not to focus there, for better or for worse.

vertex-four 10y ago

That's missing out entirely on the point of Sandstorm, which is to provide users with the ability to host their own cloud software. Sandstorm as a business was meant to be in support of that goal, rather than the product being made to fit whatever would make the business profitable at the expense of its goals.

simplehuman 10y ago

I think you are talking about developing a market place. Very different ball game than sandstorm.

eitland 10y ago
IMO closely related though. I wanted something like this: crowdfunding of apps, preferably open source. But while I though it could fit well in on top of sandstorm I understand it would be hard to pull of in a balanced way.

kentonv 10y ago

Maybe. Our feeling was that there are many other PaaS's out there already with this kind of focus, and Sandstorm doesn't really offer anything that would make it better than the alternatives. Instead, the focus of Sandstorm is to create infrastructure where the servers "report to the user" rather than to the developer, which is a very different kind of problem. I do think there are permutations of fine-grained containerization which might be interesting as a PaaS but we consciously decided not to focus there, for better or for worse.