Sandstorm: Self-hosted Alternative to Google Apps

General
#1

Not explicitly music related, but a potentially important tool for other parts of your life: https://sandstorm.io/

I had to share because I honestly feel like this is one of the most inspiring tech startups out there (Discourse is another favorite). They make a web app platform that is: free, secure, open source, self-hosted, easy to use, and pretty solid. There are definitely some clunky moments and things are not super well-polished at the moment, but I fully support what they are doing and I want to see them succeed. I’m running all of the internal informational infrastructure for a 6 person company off of a single digital ocean droplet with Sandstorm, and things are working out so far.

In particular, we really like RocketChat (self-hosted Slack) and Wekan (Kanban board (ie Trello)) for work stuff.

The big thing for me is that now you don’t need to spin up a bunch of different VMs (or Docker containers) to just try out a self-hosted web app. I’d love to see more things ported to this environment. They deal with all of the security and authorization for you, and as a non-developer the 1-click install is a huge plus.

4 Likes
#2

Small World department: I know one of the founders, Kenton. My first project at Google was leading research in the area of capability systems, which are also the underpinning of security in Sandstorm.

4 Likes
#3

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. This looks very interesting (and timely at that).

#4

From a quick search he seems like an interesting dude…did you ever get to play at the video game house?

#5

Thank you for this. Truly interesting technology - we’re checking it out now for RocketChat and Wekan specifically. Developer credentials are humbling, Audrey Tang involved too, and every startup needs a Chief Entropy Officer.

2 Likes
#6

Nope - but co-workers did, and said it is as awesome as it looks.

1 Like
#7

Bumping this after finding out you can use WordPress and Piwik (self hosted web analytics) directly in SandStorm. Also, 2017 is going to be awesome.