13 ms·

Sandstorm Oasis Is Shutting Down

225 points by kawera 7y ago

ykevinator 7y ago
What is it?
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  Sandstorm is an open source platform for web apps. Basically instead of having to host a bunch of different servers for different web apps you want to run on a server, they're packaged and installed in a way much like you'd install and run apps on your phone. Just, on a web service. For me it entirely replaced Google Docs (using Etherpad and EtherCalc) and Trello (using Wekan) in particular. I'm also super dependent on it for my RSS reader with Tiny Tiny RSS. Everything on it you could host yourself individually, but it's easier and more secure via Sandstorm.
  - ChristianBundy 7y ago
    I read the article, but I'm still unclear on what "Oasis" is. Is that what they call their free offering?
    - Godel_unicode 7y ago
      https://oasis.sandstorm.io https://oasis.sandstorm.io """Sandstorm Oasis is hosted by the Sandstorm team. Sandstorm is open source; you can host it on your own server."""
    - icebraining 7y ago
      Oasis is the hosting service they offered (for hosting Sandstorm instance).
  - icebraining 7y ago
    For those who think this sounds like Docker: in a way, it's similar, but while Docker is mostly designed for packaging and running regular Linux server software, Sandstorm provides a common framework (particularly around authentication, authorization, configuration and upgrading), which makes the whole user experience much more unified, and requires less fiddling with configuration files or terminal commands, while exposing a smaller attack surface, even if the attacker manages to exploit a particular app (there are various levels of isolation, even between different documents of the same app). https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker-apps https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker-apps
  - ussrlongbow 7y ago
    Sounds like univention appliance https://www.univention.com/products/univention-app-center/app-catalog/ https://www.univention.com/products/univention-app-center/ap...
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - mnutt 7y ago
    I also like to describe sandstorm as a bit closer to native mobile app development: the developer building the app has to think harder about what permissions (capabilities) their app needs, and in exchange a non-developer can install the app safely and have more confidence that the app isn’t full of security holes or leaking their data, intentionally or unintentionally.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
As a big Sandstorm user and contributor this is a pretty sad day for me, I've found using Oasis to be pretty darn convenient. But I'll be setting up my selfhosted version this fall. Sandstorm hasn't seen a ton of improvement over the past year but that hasn't been a bad thing: It's been a consistent and rock solid product I can rely on whenever I need it.
sansnomme 7y ago
A week ago I mentioned that it was half dead, guess this is the final nail in its coffin. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20933849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20933849
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  My hope is that someday we'll see a resurgence of development for it, or the creation of something new like it. A lot of open source projects have survived on a very slow burn for a very long time, only to show up again later. What's truly unfortunate, is Sandstorm was massively ahead of it's time: A lot more people are willing to understand the need for Sandstorm today than they were just a few years ago, when Sandstorm was an active development project. I feel like if Sandstorm had launched in 2019, it'd have enjoyed a lot wider support than people were ready for in 2014.
  - ben_jones 7y ago
    There will be a continual need to "hold your own corner" of the internet (self-hosting common services) as it becomes even more segmented by Google, Facebook, and advertising companies like them.
AlchemistCamp 7y ago
This is sad. But there is still hope. Open source is very hard to kill. Anyone, anywhere can take up the mantle and Sandstorm will go on.
anderspitman 7y ago
Sandstorm is one of the coolest pieces of tech I've come across in the last few years. Not just on a philosophical self-hosting level, but also a technical level (capnproto is awesome). I'm working on a product right now that is heavily inspired by Sandstorm. In my opinion the one thing that makes it hard for sandstorm to grow is the requirement that apps have to specifically be modified to work on the platform, and it never reached critical mass of developers building in sandstorm support to their apps. So it's essentially a chicken-and-egg problem. I'm not sure what the solution to that is. I would love to read a pseudo-postmortem (I refuse to believe this heralds the death of sandstorm) by @kentonv about what he thinks the main challenges of getting to a truly decentralized world are, how sandstorm plays in, and where we go from here.
- kentonv 7y ago
  > In my opinion the one thing that makes it hard for sandstorm to grow is the requirement that apps have to specifically be modified to work on the platform This is true, though of course without that requirement, Sandstorm wouldn't be able to do what it does. More broadly, I think the challenge we have today is that we've settled into a local maximum way of doing things that we call "Cloud Architecture" and "Software as a Service". The industry has spent many billions of dollars exploring and optimizing this approach. Even open source developers are designing their little apps using hyper-scalable techniques because they think that's what they're "supposed" to do -- never mind that such architecture is actively hostile towards small-scale self-hosting. I think the Sandstorm approach -- which is essentially "distribute apps to people's personal servers the same way you distribute apps to phones today" -- would be vastly preferable (both to users and developers), if it had the same level of development and investment. We can't just invest $100B upfront to build the new world, so instead we need to find an incremental strategy to get there. That's the hard part. Sandstorm tried to harness the investment already being made by "indie" / open source developers. We got a long way with not very much money! But the indie motif didn't exactly give us enterprise credibility, or any other way to sustain the company. My new hope is that "mainstream" cloud infrastructure will push towards being incrementally more and more decentralized on a technical level, because of the technical advantages that brings... If your software is designed to run as a million little servers rather than one huge one, then a company like Cloudflare (my current employer) can go deploy it to literally hundreds of locations around the world for huge savings in latency and long-haul bandwidth, better reliability, etc. Then once apps are designed that way, maybe, just maybe, it'll be easier to flip control of code execution and data away from the vendor towards the consumer? But obviously there's a long way to go to get there.
jimmcslim 7y ago
I alway felt that Sandstorm would be an ideal project for one of the NAS vendors like Synology, QNAP, or Netgear to get behind.
simplehuman 7y ago
as an alternative, cloudron.io is a good way to run apps on your own server. I think one of the main differences is that the app packages are regularly updated and maintained. And it uses docker, so a bit easier to sort out problems.
- filmgirlcw 7y ago
  It also costs $30 a month if you want to use it with more than 2 apps. And I think Cloudron is an excellent project and I would be happy to pay, but paying 3x or 6x the cost of my VPS for an easier way to run apps is just too rich for my blood.
kissgyorgy 7y ago
Wow I started to implement essentially the same thing for small businesses, I did not know about Sandstorm. Does this means this is a bad idea?
- dev_dull 7y ago
  Did you take VC?
  - kissgyorgy 7y ago
    No.
- mynegation 7y ago
  This is subject to the specifics and execution. The likes of BitNami, NextCloud, Cloudron, Yunohost continue to operate, acquired or standalone.
- teleclimber 7y ago
  I asked Kenton V about the reasons for the failure of the business. You might be interested in his reply[0]. My 0.02: I'd interview your target market to find out if this is a pain point they recognize. Many of these projects are started out of decentralization idealism (for good reason, and it's not a bad thing), but as a business you do not want to be left having to educate your potential buyers about why they need this. [0] https://twitter.com/teleclimber/status/1173345736013910017 https://twitter.com/teleclimber/status/1173345736013910017
  - anderspitman 7y ago
    Agreed. You shouldn't have to explain someone's problem to them. Ideally when you present a good solution they will immediately match it to a pain point they're already experiencing.
    - kentonv 7y ago
      To be fair, we didn't try to go around selling businesses on "decentralization idealism"; that would obviously be silly. Plenty of enterprises already need to self-host services, for compliance reasons (ITAR, FISMA, HIPAA, FINRA, GDPR, national data locality laws in Germany, Russia, China, South Korea, and others), or sometimes even just paranoia. The need is very much there. But, like, we literally didn't know where to start. Pick up a phone and just, like, call people? Apparently that's how sales works but I'm sure as hell not the person to do it. I hate it when people call me! How could I call someone? So we didn't call anyone, and mostly hoped that fans on Hacker News would go sell Sandstorm to their IT departments for us. That was dumb and didn't work.
redshirtrob 7y ago
Never heard of them. June 31, 2020? I'm guessing this is a weird leap-year bug. Dates are hard. Use a library. Always.
- kentonv 7y ago
  No it's just me, a human, being an idiot and forgetting how many days are in June. Fixed now.
  - redshirtrob 7y ago
    Fair enough. I'm glad you fixed it.
- anon1m0us 7y ago
  There's a not un-serious push to switch to permanent daylight savings in Cascadia (western part of north america). I wonder what this will do to all the date code that doesn't use a library or libraries that aren't updated.
  - kentonv 7y ago
    DST rules change all the time, all over the world. Any software that gets DST right today must be using a library. Even if you only look at the US, ten years ago Congress changed the dates that DST starts and ends and it wasn't a big deal. There's also many places in the US today that use permanent DST or permanent non-DST, so that's not even new, really.
    - redshirtrob 7y ago
      Heh. Hence my comment. I actually had to deal with that DST change on a bunch of embedded systems back in 2006 (or so). Super fun pushing updates to 100+ systems over analog modems.
orblivion 7y ago
Kenton - You say we shouldn't rely on you to safeguard our data. How does this affect security updates? As it is, I don't put awfully sensitive things on there anyway because Linode still has access to it. But it would be good to know where to draw the line. I'm hoping that since you rely on it for email, you're gonna do basic security hole plugging at least? Thanks as always in either case. Hoping it somehow gets new life down the line after this!
- kentonv 7y ago
  Yes, I plan to continue pushing security updates for Sandstorm as I have been for the last five years, and self-hosted Sandstorm is very good about auto-updating. Meanwhile, with a self-hosted server, you get better security (compared to Oasis) due to the fact that only you and people you authorize can install apps on that server. For even more security you can of course put it on a private network or behind Cloudflare Access[0] for extra defense-in-depth. Note: I don't rely on Sandstorm for email yet, because Sandstorm doesn't have good email support currently... but I'd like to build that support, because I'm getting really uncomfortable with gmail. [0] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-access/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-access/ -- Disclosure: I work for Cloudflare.
akkartik 7y ago
My reaction after reading this is that if it's too much burden for the original author to keep up with updates, it's very hard to make a case for people to self-host their own services using Sandstorm. Upgrade effort will now get multiplied many-fold as everybody has to duplicate the effort that one maintainer was putting in. Sandstorm is an amazing project, and the people who built it are way better programmers than me. But I'm betting that we need to go even deeper and think about why the maintenance burden for software is so high. https://github.com/akkartik/mu#readme https://github.com/akkartik/mu#readme This is a very long-term project, and it's still early days. But none of the short-cuts seem to pan out. It makes me sad, and it stiffens my resolve.
- kentonv 7y ago
  > My reaction after reading this is that if it's too much burden for the original author to keep up with updates, it's very hard to make a case for people to self-host their own services using Sandstorm. Upgrade effort will now get multiplied many-fold as everybody has to duplicate the effort that one maintainer was putting in. That's not correct. Self-hosted sandstorm is completely auto-updating. You don't have to do anything. I still have to push updates periodically, but I intend to keep doing that. After I push an update, all Sandstorm servers update themselves automatically within 24 hours. Updating Oasis was, ironically, much more work for me than pushing an update to self-hosted sandstorm. Oasis is built on a much more complicated cluster architecture designed to be scalable -- scale that, sadly, we never actually needed.
  - garganzol 7y ago
    Kenton, pardon my hyperactivity, but here is a couple of observations you may find useful: >Oasis is built on a much more complicated cluster architecture designed to be scalable You could dog food Oasis on top of Sandstorm. For example, Oasis could be a Sandstorm app and use Sandstorm services. In this way, you could feel very closely where and when Sandstorm is lacking. And once you fix or invent those parts, the results would be available to all of your customers, and not exclusively to Oasis. This would shift the laborious spot from Oasis to Sandstorm, and would allow you to open up the enterprise gates. The second observation is a model of sales. You sold a "decentralization idealism" as you coined it, but with an optional central place like Oasis. In my opinion, this offering represents a natural conflict and is not destined to work in a sustainable way. Why not sell a good old license for advanced/enterprisey features? Oasis would be a great add-on to that model for those who wanted to rent the resources. And yes, exclude the free tier from Oasis to make things fair.
unityByFreedom 7y ago
This is one of the coolest, boldest concepts I ever saw, and put forth by an extremely capable programmer and human. I look forward to hearing more from Kenton in the future.
phoe-krk 7y ago
Insightful sentence: > While Sandstorm was popular on Hacker News, that popularity never really converted into paying users.
garganzol 7y ago
Back in the day I approached Sandstorm by email and asked if they could provide an Enterprise/Server edition of Sandstorm (hosted apps with stable/customizable endpoints, authentication and stuff). I directly communicated to them that we are ready to shell out something like $2,000 per license. The answer by Kenton surprised me. He told they are aiming to get the consumer market first. Which is a bit odd, given the server is where the money is. Enterprises of all kinds already have their hierarchies of customers. Moreover, they are in a constant need of a simple but highly efficient server platform (see Kubernetes of a future). It would be a much easier sell to them.
- kentonv 7y ago
  You must have caught us early on, when our focus was more on attracting developers than attracting users. Later on we were trying very hard to find enterprise customers who would pay us something like $2000.
slezyr 7y ago
https://sandstorm.io/install https://sandstorm.io/install > Alternatively, you can let us run the server for you: Use Sandstorm Oasis They still have this remark on install page.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  There's probably several references to signing up for Oasis on the website yet. They'll all get purged with time.
underdeserver 7y ago
Sounds like awesome tech with a bad sales plan. Would you consider selling?
- std_throwaway 7y ago
  Selling what?
- kentonv 7y ago
  The tech is all open source. Anyone is free to try to make a business out of it (under a new name), no need to buy from us.
test1979 7y ago
Thats sad news

225 points by kawera 7y ago

ykevinator 7y ago

What is it?

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Sandstorm is an open source platform for web apps. Basically instead of having to host a bunch of different servers for different web apps you want to run on a server, they're packaged and installed in a way much like you'd install and run apps on your phone. Just, on a web service. For me it entirely replaced Google Docs (using Etherpad and EtherCalc) and Trello (using Wekan) in particular. I'm also super dependent on it for my RSS reader with Tiny Tiny RSS. Everything on it you could host yourself individually, but it's easier and more secure via Sandstorm.
- ChristianBundy 7y ago
  I read the article, but I'm still unclear on what "Oasis" is. Is that what they call their free offering?
  - Godel_unicode 7y ago
    https://oasis.sandstorm.io https://oasis.sandstorm.io """Sandstorm Oasis is hosted by the Sandstorm team. Sandstorm is open source; you can host it on your own server."""
  - icebraining 7y ago
    Oasis is the hosting service they offered (for hosting Sandstorm instance).
- icebraining 7y ago
  For those who think this sounds like Docker: in a way, it's similar, but while Docker is mostly designed for packaging and running regular Linux server software, Sandstorm provides a common framework (particularly around authentication, authorization, configuration and upgrading), which makes the whole user experience much more unified, and requires less fiddling with configuration files or terminal commands, while exposing a smaller attack surface, even if the attacker manages to exploit a particular app (there are various levels of isolation, even between different documents of the same app). https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker-apps https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker-apps
- ussrlongbow 7y ago
  Sounds like univention appliance https://www.univention.com/products/univention-app-center/app-catalog/ https://www.univention.com/products/univention-app-center/ap...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- mnutt 7y ago
  I also like to describe sandstorm as a bit closer to native mobile app development: the developer building the app has to think harder about what permissions (capabilities) their app needs, and in exchange a non-developer can install the app safely and have more confidence that the app isn’t full of security holes or leaking their data, intentionally or unintentionally.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

As a big Sandstorm user and contributor this is a pretty sad day for me, I've found using Oasis to be pretty darn convenient. But I'll be setting up my selfhosted version this fall. Sandstorm hasn't seen a ton of improvement over the past year but that hasn't been a bad thing: It's been a consistent and rock solid product I can rely on whenever I need it.

sansnomme 7y ago

A week ago I mentioned that it was half dead, guess this is the final nail in its coffin. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20933849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20933849

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
My hope is that someday we'll see a resurgence of development for it, or the creation of something new like it. A lot of open source projects have survived on a very slow burn for a very long time, only to show up again later. What's truly unfortunate, is Sandstorm was massively ahead of it's time: A lot more people are willing to understand the need for Sandstorm today than they were just a few years ago, when Sandstorm was an active development project. I feel like if Sandstorm had launched in 2019, it'd have enjoyed a lot wider support than people were ready for in 2014.
- ben_jones 7y ago
  There will be a continual need to "hold your own corner" of the internet (self-hosting common services) as it becomes even more segmented by Google, Facebook, and advertising companies like them.

AlchemistCamp 7y ago

This is sad. But there is still hope. Open source is very hard to kill. Anyone, anywhere can take up the mantle and Sandstorm will go on.

anderspitman 7y ago

Sandstorm is one of the coolest pieces of tech I've come across in the last few years. Not just on a philosophical self-hosting level, but also a technical level (capnproto is awesome). I'm working on a product right now that is heavily inspired by Sandstorm. In my opinion the one thing that makes it hard for sandstorm to grow is the requirement that apps have to specifically be modified to work on the platform, and it never reached critical mass of developers building in sandstorm support to their apps. So it's essentially a chicken-and-egg problem. I'm not sure what the solution to that is. I would love to read a pseudo-postmortem (I refuse to believe this heralds the death of sandstorm) by @kentonv about what he thinks the main challenges of getting to a truly decentralized world are, how sandstorm plays in, and where we go from here.

kentonv 7y ago
> In my opinion the one thing that makes it hard for sandstorm to grow is the requirement that apps have to specifically be modified to work on the platform This is true, though of course without that requirement, Sandstorm wouldn't be able to do what it does. More broadly, I think the challenge we have today is that we've settled into a local maximum way of doing things that we call "Cloud Architecture" and "Software as a Service". The industry has spent many billions of dollars exploring and optimizing this approach. Even open source developers are designing their little apps using hyper-scalable techniques because they think that's what they're "supposed" to do -- never mind that such architecture is actively hostile towards small-scale self-hosting. I think the Sandstorm approach -- which is essentially "distribute apps to people's personal servers the same way you distribute apps to phones today" -- would be vastly preferable (both to users and developers), if it had the same level of development and investment. We can't just invest $100B upfront to build the new world, so instead we need to find an incremental strategy to get there. That's the hard part. Sandstorm tried to harness the investment already being made by "indie" / open source developers. We got a long way with not very much money! But the indie motif didn't exactly give us enterprise credibility, or any other way to sustain the company. My new hope is that "mainstream" cloud infrastructure will push towards being incrementally more and more decentralized on a technical level, because of the technical advantages that brings... If your software is designed to run as a million little servers rather than one huge one, then a company like Cloudflare (my current employer) can go deploy it to literally hundreds of locations around the world for huge savings in latency and long-haul bandwidth, better reliability, etc. Then once apps are designed that way, maybe, just maybe, it'll be easier to flip control of code execution and data away from the vendor towards the consumer? But obviously there's a long way to go to get there.

jimmcslim 7y ago

I alway felt that Sandstorm would be an ideal project for one of the NAS vendors like Synology, QNAP, or Netgear to get behind.

simplehuman 7y ago

as an alternative, cloudron.io is a good way to run apps on your own server. I think one of the main differences is that the app packages are regularly updated and maintained. And it uses docker, so a bit easier to sort out problems.

filmgirlcw 7y ago
It also costs $30 a month if you want to use it with more than 2 apps. And I think Cloudron is an excellent project and I would be happy to pay, but paying 3x or 6x the cost of my VPS for an easier way to run apps is just too rich for my blood.

kissgyorgy 7y ago

Wow I started to implement essentially the same thing for small businesses, I did not know about Sandstorm. Does this means this is a bad idea?

dev_dull 7y ago
Did you take VC?
- kissgyorgy 7y ago
  No.
mynegation 7y ago
This is subject to the specifics and execution. The likes of BitNami, NextCloud, Cloudron, Yunohost continue to operate, acquired or standalone.
teleclimber 7y ago
I asked Kenton V about the reasons for the failure of the business. You might be interested in his reply[0]. My 0.02: I'd interview your target market to find out if this is a pain point they recognize. Many of these projects are started out of decentralization idealism (for good reason, and it's not a bad thing), but as a business you do not want to be left having to educate your potential buyers about why they need this. [0] https://twitter.com/teleclimber/status/1173345736013910017 https://twitter.com/teleclimber/status/1173345736013910017
- anderspitman 7y ago
  Agreed. You shouldn't have to explain someone's problem to them. Ideally when you present a good solution they will immediately match it to a pain point they're already experiencing.
  - kentonv 7y ago
    To be fair, we didn't try to go around selling businesses on "decentralization idealism"; that would obviously be silly. Plenty of enterprises already need to self-host services, for compliance reasons (ITAR, FISMA, HIPAA, FINRA, GDPR, national data locality laws in Germany, Russia, China, South Korea, and others), or sometimes even just paranoia. The need is very much there. But, like, we literally didn't know where to start. Pick up a phone and just, like, call people? Apparently that's how sales works but I'm sure as hell not the person to do it. I hate it when people call me! How could I call someone? So we didn't call anyone, and mostly hoped that fans on Hacker News would go sell Sandstorm to their IT departments for us. That was dumb and didn't work.

redshirtrob 7y ago

Never heard of them. June 31, 2020? I'm guessing this is a weird leap-year bug. Dates are hard. Use a library. Always.

kentonv 7y ago
No it's just me, a human, being an idiot and forgetting how many days are in June. Fixed now.
- redshirtrob 7y ago
  Fair enough. I'm glad you fixed it.
anon1m0us 7y ago
There's a not un-serious push to switch to permanent daylight savings in Cascadia (western part of north america). I wonder what this will do to all the date code that doesn't use a library or libraries that aren't updated.
- kentonv 7y ago
  DST rules change all the time, all over the world. Any software that gets DST right today must be using a library. Even if you only look at the US, ten years ago Congress changed the dates that DST starts and ends and it wasn't a big deal. There's also many places in the US today that use permanent DST or permanent non-DST, so that's not even new, really.
  - redshirtrob 7y ago
    Heh. Hence my comment. I actually had to deal with that DST change on a bunch of embedded systems back in 2006 (or so). Super fun pushing updates to 100+ systems over analog modems.

orblivion 7y ago

Kenton - You say we shouldn't rely on you to safeguard our data. How does this affect security updates? As it is, I don't put awfully sensitive things on there anyway because Linode still has access to it. But it would be good to know where to draw the line. I'm hoping that since you rely on it for email, you're gonna do basic security hole plugging at least? Thanks as always in either case. Hoping it somehow gets new life down the line after this!

kentonv 7y ago
Yes, I plan to continue pushing security updates for Sandstorm as I have been for the last five years, and self-hosted Sandstorm is very good about auto-updating. Meanwhile, with a self-hosted server, you get better security (compared to Oasis) due to the fact that only you and people you authorize can install apps on that server. For even more security you can of course put it on a private network or behind Cloudflare Access[0] for extra defense-in-depth. Note: I don't rely on Sandstorm for email yet, because Sandstorm doesn't have good email support currently... but I'd like to build that support, because I'm getting really uncomfortable with gmail. [0] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-access/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-access/ -- Disclosure: I work for Cloudflare.

akkartik 7y ago

My reaction after reading this is that if it's too much burden for the original author to keep up with updates, it's very hard to make a case for people to self-host their own services using Sandstorm. Upgrade effort will now get multiplied many-fold as everybody has to duplicate the effort that one maintainer was putting in. Sandstorm is an amazing project, and the people who built it are way better programmers than me. But I'm betting that we need to go even deeper and think about why the maintenance burden for software is so high. https://github.com/akkartik/mu#readme https://github.com/akkartik/mu#readme This is a very long-term project, and it's still early days. But none of the short-cuts seem to pan out. It makes me sad, and it stiffens my resolve.

kentonv 7y ago
> My reaction after reading this is that if it's too much burden for the original author to keep up with updates, it's very hard to make a case for people to self-host their own services using Sandstorm. Upgrade effort will now get multiplied many-fold as everybody has to duplicate the effort that one maintainer was putting in. That's not correct. Self-hosted sandstorm is completely auto-updating. You don't have to do anything. I still have to push updates periodically, but I intend to keep doing that. After I push an update, all Sandstorm servers update themselves automatically within 24 hours. Updating Oasis was, ironically, much more work for me than pushing an update to self-hosted sandstorm. Oasis is built on a much more complicated cluster architecture designed to be scalable -- scale that, sadly, we never actually needed.
- garganzol 7y ago
  Kenton, pardon my hyperactivity, but here is a couple of observations you may find useful: >Oasis is built on a much more complicated cluster architecture designed to be scalable You could dog food Oasis on top of Sandstorm. For example, Oasis could be a Sandstorm app and use Sandstorm services. In this way, you could feel very closely where and when Sandstorm is lacking. And once you fix or invent those parts, the results would be available to all of your customers, and not exclusively to Oasis. This would shift the laborious spot from Oasis to Sandstorm, and would allow you to open up the enterprise gates. The second observation is a model of sales. You sold a "decentralization idealism" as you coined it, but with an optional central place like Oasis. In my opinion, this offering represents a natural conflict and is not destined to work in a sustainable way. Why not sell a good old license for advanced/enterprisey features? Oasis would be a great add-on to that model for those who wanted to rent the resources. And yes, exclude the free tier from Oasis to make things fair.

unityByFreedom 7y ago

This is one of the coolest, boldest concepts I ever saw, and put forth by an extremely capable programmer and human. I look forward to hearing more from Kenton in the future.

phoe-krk 7y ago

Insightful sentence: > While Sandstorm was popular on Hacker News, that popularity never really converted into paying users.

garganzol 7y ago

Back in the day I approached Sandstorm by email and asked if they could provide an Enterprise/Server edition of Sandstorm (hosted apps with stable/customizable endpoints, authentication and stuff). I directly communicated to them that we are ready to shell out something like $2,000 per license. The answer by Kenton surprised me. He told they are aiming to get the consumer market first. Which is a bit odd, given the server is where the money is. Enterprises of all kinds already have their hierarchies of customers. Moreover, they are in a constant need of a simple but highly efficient server platform (see Kubernetes of a future). It would be a much easier sell to them.

kentonv 7y ago
You must have caught us early on, when our focus was more on attracting developers than attracting users. Later on we were trying very hard to find enterprise customers who would pay us something like $2000.

slezyr 7y ago

https://sandstorm.io/install https://sandstorm.io/install > Alternatively, you can let us run the server for you: Use Sandstorm Oasis They still have this remark on install page.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
There's probably several references to signing up for Oasis on the website yet. They'll all get purged with time.

underdeserver 7y ago

Sounds like awesome tech with a bad sales plan. Would you consider selling?

std_throwaway 7y ago
Selling what?
kentonv 7y ago
The tech is all open source. Anyone is free to try to make a business out of it (under a new name), no need to buy from us.

test1979 7y ago

Thats sad news